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from Marshall Auerback and RWER issue no.92 In the daily TV press conferences that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo conducted throughout the spring, he referred to COVID-19 as “the great equalizer.” In the sense that anybody can be infected by the virus, the governor is right. Yet after several months, the data shows clearly the impact is unequally landing on the shoulders of people of color and all but the wealthiest. The health impacts and absence of economic measures to protect them are...

sanity, humanity and science                       probably the world’s most read economics journalreal-world economics review Please click here to support this journal and the WEA back issues Subscribers: 26,271 subscribe RWER Blog ISSN 1755-9472A journal of the World Economics Association (WEA) 14,468 members, join Sister journals: Economic Thought and WEA Commentaries Issue no. 92 29 June 2020The Inequality Crisis download whole issue The three options: an introductionEdward...

from Dean Baker The Washington Post ran a piece on how patterns of globalization may be changed due to the pandemic. It is more than a bit confused in not distinguishing short-term effects from long-term effects and its inability to distinguish between problems caused by fiscal policy and policies caused by the fallout from the pandemic. The headline for the piece on the Post’s homepage is “Covid-19 is erasing decades of economic gains achieved through globalization.” The subhead is “The...

from Norbert Norbert Häring A turmoil has engulfed the faculties of economics at the University of Chicago and Harvard. A German economist was first suspended on accusations of racism in Chicago, then rehabilitated. An article in Harvard’s flagship Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) is accused of a colonial attitude. The authors justify themselves. The article describes how a German economist, Harald Uhlig,caused a vritable shitstorm, fuelled not least by Paul Krugman and Justin...

from Dean Baker As we get more data in, it seems increasingly likely that we are looking at a horrible and prolonged recession, not a complete economic collapse of Great Depression proportions. The May employment report showed a substantial bounce back in employment, with jobs up by more than 2.5 million from the April level. Retail sales had a huge 17.7 percent jump in May, by far the largest on record, although they are still 6.1 percent below the May 2019 level. Mortgage applications...

from Lars Syll When we cannot accept that the observations, along the time-series available to us, are independent, or cannot by some device be divided into groups that can be treated as independent, we get into much deeper water. For we have then, in strict logic, no more than one observation, all of the separate items having to be taken together. For the analysis of that the probability calculus is useless; it does not apply. We are left to use our judgement, making sense of what has...

from Peter Radford The biography of Keynes by Zachary Carter ends on a decidedly wimpy note.  The concluding chapter is devoted to the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent half-hearted sort-0f-Keynesian policy response.  Whilst Carter seems fine with his condemnation of neoliberal policies and is clear about the abject failure of the notion that financial markets act in either a self-correcting or a rational manner, he then goes on to ask why Keynesianism has proven to be so...

from Asad Zaman The previous post (Three Mega-Events Which Shape Our Minds) explains the importance of history in shaping the world we live in. Historical events (facts) by themselves are not meaningful until they are linked together into a coherent narrative. The mortar which connects the facts must be supplied by our minds, and can never be asserted with certainty. The fact that we can never be certain about the narratives which connect and explain history has led to two polar mistakes....

from Dean Baker I have long been a big fan of a vacant property tax. As the old saying goes, you tax what you want less, and why would we want vacant properties. This is especially likely to be relevant in many high-priced cities where the demand for commercial real estate is likely to go through the floor due to an increase in telecommuting. As cities mull many types of tax increases to deal with pandemic caused budget shortfalls, a vacant property tax should stand out as a productive...