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from Dean Baker We all know Donald Trump’s tendency to make up numbers to tell everyone what a great job he is doing as president. People are rightly appalled, both that Trump is not doing a great job, but also that he is lying to imply otherwise. While Trump is clearly over the top in just inventing data to back his argument, Democrats are also often not very straightforward in assessing the data. We got a dose of that last week when there were complaints that the rate of income...

real-world economics reviewPlease click here to support this open-access journal and the WEA back issues18 September 2018issue no. 85download whole issue Globalization checkmated?Thomas Palley          download pdf Post-crisis, next crisis Capital and class: Inequality after the crashDavid Ruccio and Jamie Morgan          download pdf Post-crisis perspective: sorting out money and credit and why they matter!John M. Balder           download pdf  With their back to the future, will past...

from Dean Baker Former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell had an op-ed in the NYT explaining how efforts to increase transparency had not ended the corrupting influence of money on medical research. Her piece describes various ways in which the researchers who get money from drug companies bend research to favor their benefactors. While Dr. Angell suggests some reforms, there is an obvious one that is overlooked: take the money out. Drug companies have incentives to bend...

from Asad Zaman What is a model? How does it relate to reality? This question has been discussed thoroughly in previous post on  Models and Reality , and briefly in previous lectures. Western understanding of models was derailed by a complex set of historical accidents. This is a tangled tale with bewildering twists and turns, some aspects of which are discussed in “Deification of Science and Its Disastrous Consequence“, and some others in Logical Positivism and Islamic Economics . The...

from Dean Baker Last week marked 10 years since the harrowing descent into the financial crisis — when the huge investment bank Lehman Bros. went into bankruptcy, with the country’s largest insurer, AIG, about to follow. No one was sure which financial institution might be next to fall. The banking system started to freeze up. Banks typically extend short-term credit to one another for a few hundredths of a percentage point more than the cost of borrowing from the federal government. This...

from Jan Kregel  source The 10th anniversary of the September collapse of the US financial system has led to a number of commentaries on the causes of the Lehman bankruptcy and cures for its aftermath. Most tend to focus on identifying the proximate causes of the crisis in an attempt to assess the adequacy of the regulations put in place after the crisis to prevent a repetition. It is interesting that while Hyman Minsky’s work became a touchstone of attempts to analyze the crisis as...

from Lars Syll We are all realists and we all — Mäki, Cartwright, and I — self-consciously present ourselves as such. The most obvious research-guiding commonality, perhaps, is that we do all look at the ontological presuppositions of economics or economists. Where we part company, I believe, is that I want to go much further. I guess I would see their work as primarily analytical and my own as more critically constructive or dialectical. My goal is less the clarification of what...

from David Ruccio The warnings about the consequences of global warming are becoming increasingly dire. And with good reason. Just last month, a report by a multidisciplinary research team published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences made the case that even fairly modest future carbon dioxide emissions could set off a cascade of catastrophic effects, with melting permafrost releasing methane to ratchet up global temperatures enough to drive much of the Amazon to die...