Real-World Economics Review

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...

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...