Real-World Economics Review

from Peter Radford The Bank for International Settlements issued its annual report yesterday.  Perhaps the central banks are feeling a little insecure, or perhaps they are a little more sensitive to economic reality, but the BIS felt compelled to use one third of its report to tackle inequality.  Here’s the summary as given in the report: “Key takeaways The long-term rise in economic inequality since the 1980s is largely due to structural factors, well outside the reach of monetary...

from Dean Baker I know I harp a lot on all the ways we structure the market to redistribute income upward, but that’s because we keep digging in deeper on these policies, and almost no one else talks about it. I get that it’s cool to talk about all sorts of tax and transfer schemes to redistribute some of the money we give to the rich and super-rich. But, I’m one of those old-fashion sorts who thinks it’s simpler just not to give them all the money in the first place. So, now that you...

Harley brand LED front turn signal kit in Amber with Clear lens covers. This is not the standard plug and play light set that you see online or a all in 1-piece that easily snaps in! The wiring was difficult to deal with due to the fact the leftover wire inside the signal light was short but I managed using butt splice connectors and not with the ones supplied with the kit. When the red led lights show up, I will so the full box set with all the various parts.

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from Thomas Piketty in Le Monde The Covid crisis is forcing us to rethink the tools of redistribution and solidarity. Proposals are springing up everywhere . . . . The idea that we just have to wait for wealth to spread doesn’t make much sense: if that were the case, we would have seen it long ago. The simplest solution is a redistribution of inheritance allowing the whole population to receive a minimal inheritance, which, to fix ideas, could be of the order of 120,000 Euros (i.e. 60% of...

from Lars Syll Mainstream macroeconomics can only progress if it gets rid of the DSGE albatross around its neck. It is better to do it now than to wait for another 20 years because the question is not whether but when DSGE modeling will be discarded. DSGE modeling is a story of a death foretold … Getting rid of DSGE models is critical because the hegemonic DSGE program is crowding out alternative macro methodologies that do work … DSGE practitioners, who with a mixture of bluff and...

from Dean Baker Like most economists, I have always been a Bitcoin skeptic. The question has always been what purpose does it serve? The idea that it would be a useful alternative currency is laughable on its face. How can you have a currency that wildly fluctuates year to year and even hour to hour?  Imagine if you had a wage or rent contract written in Bitcoin. Both your pay and your rent would have more than tripled over the last year, likely leaving you unemployed and unable to pay...

from  Finance as warfare by Michael Hudson The economy is polarizing because of how the 1% use their wealth. If they invested their fortunes productively as “job creators” – as mainstream textbooks describe them as doing – there would be some logic in today’s tax favoritism and financial bailouts. Rentier elites would be doing what governments are supposed to do. Instead, today’s financial oligarchy lends out its savings to indebt the economy at large, and uses its gains to buy control...

from Lars Syll If contributions made by statisticians to the understanding of causation are to be taken over with advantage in any specific field of inquiry, then what is crucial is that the right relationship should exist between statistical and subject-matter concerns … Where the ultimate aim of research is not prediction per se but rather causal explanation, an idea of causation that is expressed in terms of predictive power — as, for example, ‘Granger’ causation — is likely to be...