Real-World Economics Review

from Peter Radford I was lucky enough last week to meet a few friends for the first time in person since the pandemic swept all before it.  We are an eclectic group with more than a fair influence of Wall Street.  Given all that is going on, and has gone on since we last met face-to-face, I expected to be drawn into endless political discussions.  But no, we spent a majority of our time talking about how the pandemic has accelerated the current wave of technological change.  At one point...

from Lars Syll There are other sleights of hand that cause economists problems. In their quest for statistical “identification” of a causal effect, economists often have to resort to techniques that answer either a narrower or a somewhat different version of the question that motivated the research. Results from randomized social experiments carried out in particular regions of, say, India or Kenya may not apply to other regions or countries. A research design exploiting variation across...

from Asad Zaman Underlying Philosophy of Science Many important structures of the real world are hidden from view. However, as briefly sketched in previous lecture on Ibnul Haytham: First Scientist, current views say that science is only based on observables. Causation is central to statistics and econometrics, but it is not observable. As a result, there is no notation available to describe the relationship of causation between two variables. We will use X => Y as a notation for X...

from Dean Baker Okay, it is more money than even Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have, put together. That probably still doesn’t give people too much information, since most people don’t have much familiarity with these folks fortunes. But it might be helpful if the media made some effort to put the proposed spending in President Biden’s infrastructure package in a context that would make it meaningful. The spending is supposed to take place over eight years, which means that it...

from Lars Syll The intransigence of Econ 101 points to a dark side of economics — namely that the absence of power-speak is by design. Could it be that economics describes the world in a way that purposely keeps the workings of power opaque? History suggests that this idea is not so far-fetched … The key to wielding power successfully is to make control appear legitimate. That requires ideology. Before capitalism, rulers legitimised their power by tying it to divine right. In modern...

from Peter Radford There are times when you really don’t need to say much.  The facts make the argument for you.  At such times all that matters is that the largest number of people are aware of those facts and that at least some of them speak to the issues raised. So too is with a small snippet of news I saw this morning. I came to it via the New York Times.  The original report being in Business Insider. Apparently Wall Street bonuses have risen 1,217% since 1985.  Quite what the...

Boxing Social's Rob Tebbutt spoke to Kalle Sauerland and Dean Baker of Wasserman Boxing following the announcement of a merger between Team Sauerland and Wasserman... ? BETFRED | Not Suitable for Minors | Please Gamble Responsibly | https://www.begambleaware.org/NGTS.html ? ? | SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZEOvoFUl6pkx7rts8KKkhw?sub_confirmation=1 ? - FOLLOW BOXING SOCIAL ON SOCIAL MEDIA... ? ? - TWITTER: https://twitter.com/boxing_social ? - FACEBOOK:...

from Ken Zimmerman (formerly a comment) Clearly sociopathic actions, right? “In a sociopathic society, sociopathic individual behavior is so pervasive and socially accepted that perpetrators don’t think of themselves as doing anything wrong. When cyclist champion Lance Armstrong first acknowledged in a 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey that he had been doping—using performance-enhancing drugs—and lying about it for years, she asked him if he believed he was cheating. Oprah: Did you feel...

from Lars Syll John Bryan Davis (2016) has offered a persuasive account of the way an economic orthodoxy protects its dominant position. Traditional ‘reflexive domains’ for judging research quality — the theory-evidence nexus, the history and philosophy of economics — are pushed aside. Instead, research quality is assessed through journal ranking systems. This is highly biased towards the status quo and reinforces stratification: top journals feature articles by top academics at top...

from Dean Baker It is often said that intellectuals have a hard time dealing with new ideas. Unfortunately, for purposes of public debate, open-source government funding of drug development is a new idea, and people in policy positions seem to be having a very hard time understanding it. So, I will try to write this post in a way that even a policy wonk can figure it out. The basic idea of government-funded research should not be hard to grasp since the government already funds a large...