Real-World Economics Review

Economists Julie Yixia Cai and Dean Baker present their new study showing how the high and rising non-response rate in the Current Population Survey (CPS) may underestimate unemployment for less advantaged workers, particularly young Black men. The CPS is the underlying source of many official labor market statistics, as well as income and poverty measures, and health insurance coverage. As discussants, economists William Spriggs and John Schmitt will explore the impact of bias in the CPS,...

from Ted Trainer and current RWER issue The basic justification for conventional development is that although it mostly enriches the rich, in time “…wealth will trickle down to benefit all.” There is indeed a tendency for this to happen, but there are several reasons for rejecting this strategy. Little trickles down In the global economy the amount of benefit that trickles down is evident in the fact that one-fifth of the world’s people now receive about 70 times the amount of income the...

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh For quite some time, China was seen as a ‘threat’ by virtue of being a global manufacturing hub, embedding knowledge in production and riding on its cheap labour force and large volumes of foreign investment, to win a disproportionate share of global markets. But more recent declarations from official Western sources focus on the threat stemming either from China’s illegal appropriation or theft of intellectual property, or knowledge for...

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

from Steve Keen and RWER current issue Steve: Yes, the financialisation of higher education has gone hand in hand with the growth of bureaucracy. More than all of the money raised from student loans has gone into the black hole of administration, so despite the increase in funding, there is less money going to education now than when universities were fully funded by the state. This has also perverted the educational process, for both administrators and students. Whereas administrators...

from Lars Syll There seems to be a pervasive human aversion to uncertainty, and one way to reduce feelings of uncertainty is to invest faith in deduction as a sufficient guide to truth. Unfortunately, such faith is as logically unjustified as any religious creed, since a deduction produces certainty about the real world only when its assumptions about the real world are certain … Unfortunately, assumption uncertainty reduces the status of deductions and statistical computations to...

from Asad Zaman 1         GENERALIZATIONS FROM EUROPEAN HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE? Introduction: Briefly, we can state the puzzle as: “Why does Social Science claim to be UNIVERSAL, when it is based on analysis of European historical experience?”. Many authors have recognized this problem, which manifests itself in many ways. For example, Timothy Mitchell (2002) writes: “The possibility of social science is based upon taking certain historical experiences of the West as the template for a...

from Dean Baker Since I came to Washington in 1992, I have been working alongside friends in the policy community, labor movement, and community organizations in fighting against a series of trade pacts. NAFTA was the immediate issue in 1992, but a couple of years later we had the Uruguay Round of the GATT that created the WTO. At the end of the Clinton administration, we had China’s admission to the WTO and then various other smaller pacts. Those of us who opposed these deals (which were...