Real-World Economics Review Blog

I've been following Real-World Economics Review - http://rwer.wordpress.com/ - since they were the movement for a Post-Autistic Economics - http://www.paecon.net/PAEmovementindex1.htm - Steve Keen seems to crop up there quite a bit.

Do they? From what I can tell in admittedly fairly brief reading, a single member of the family is trying to remove the name, while the rest of the family simply want it distinguished from the other prizes while not objecting to the use of the name per se. This statement from Peter Nobel[0], the man actively trying to remove the name, presumably sums up the best arguments he had available against using the name, and makes no mention of other family members trying to deny usage. [0] https://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/the-nobel-family-dissociates-its…

Hey, there is a great cartoon about that here! https://rwer.wordpress.com/2013/11/09/the-scientific-illusion-of-moder…

10 Initiate provocations in Gaza 20 Run live tests on technology 30 Use the proof of real life usage in a low boil conflict to sell the technology at international arms fairs. 40 Use realistic test conditions to refine & develop new technology for 2 years. 50 GOTO 10 This efficient QA/development cycle is a serious competitive advantage, since it's hard for other countries to replicate the same controlled conflict conditions. Hence these great sales figures: https://rwer.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/the-15-largest-arms-exporters-pe… And it's been ~2 years since the last conflict, so...: http://europe.newsweek.com/us-calls-americans-leave-gaza-soon-possible…

Having read most of the comments here, I come to the conclusion that y'all need to start comprehending the difference between 'cash' and 'bank money', and no, I don't mean the conspiracy theory laden bullshit spread around by the most terrible Zeitgeist movies. I mean the real deal. Here, a paper on it: http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue80/Huber80.pdf Huber, Joseph - Split-circuit reserve banking - functioning, dysfunctions and future perspectives Abstract: "This paper first provides a detailed outline of how the present money system works. This then serves as a backdrop to discuss a number of orthodox fallacies and heterodox flaws in money theory, followed by a summary of the dysfunctions of split-circuit reserve banking and a brief outlook on the perspective of a single-circuit sovereign money system." Keywords; monetary economics, money theory, credit creation, banking theory, fractional reserve banking, monetary policy, monetary reform One may find comments on the paper here: https://rwer.wordpress.com/comments-on-rwer-issue-no-80/ I'll quote part of the paper here, and I'd strongly recommend reading all of it if you want to have any understanding of modern economics at all: "[...] Modern money is non-cash As far as traditional solid cash (banknotes and coins) is still in use, cash circulation represents a third circuit. In contrast to precious-metal coins, and like reserves, cash is token fiat money today. But rather than circulating between central bank…

It is true that you can analyse many cryptographic schemes by modelling them as games. In fact, my PhD was largely focused on this exact topic :-) Our discussion really depends on what we define as “game theory” and “graph theory” I suppose. The game theory I studied in economics (albeit in my undergrad) I'm very skeptical of, though. It was about exact payoffs and rational agents and loads of assumptions that really don't work in real-life. I'd spend time literally analysing optimal strategies in board games. It all seemed kind of pointless. People always said you can apply game theory to political science and wars, but it all seemed like common sense and logic, rather than the specific stuff I was actually studying. I remember solving integral equations to calculate Nash equilibrium bidding strategies in third price bid auctions with perfect information and a uniform distribution of value to buyers. The solutions had a lot of maths, but had no bearing on reality whatsoever. What I studied was never really used to make any actual predictions in the real world. It seemed almost as if they were trying to make this subject mathematical to give it some legitimacy. A lot of it is common sense. One could argue that studying it helps you think logically I guess, but so do lots of things. Ariel Rubinstein is a famous economist and actually one of the founders of game theory and gave an excellent critique of the whole space. He is a lot more eloquent than I. You should listen to…

The same arguments have been made about the internet and other technological advances, and yet, inequality has _grown_ sharply in the past 50 years. So no, "trickle down technologies", just like "trickle down economics", does not work. https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/income-inequality-1970-2015-usa-…

I mean quite a few people treat it differently, you just have to look as far as some of Nobels decedents. Wyattpeak linked the article a bit below. >It is a deceptive utilisation of the institution of the Nobel Prize and what it represents. https://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/the-nobel-family-dissociates-its… Not to mention one of its awardees, Hayek. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/speech/

If we're talking outside the western world, things have changed far more dramatically. Across the developing world, hundreds of millions of people have risen out of abject poverty. My wife grew up in China, in a house her father built from a pile of bricks provided by his employer. She helped make their floor tiles, and this was in an industrial city. China's a different world now, and while they are the poster child, this trend isn't isolated to them. The chart linked below is astounding. https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/global-income-distribution-1800-…

The url should be changed to: https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/03/06/if-poor-people-knew-how-rich-ric… Also, like Piketty said in his book, this trend could be inversed and stabilized if we had more taxes on capital, that's literally the solution to world hunger / education / healthcare.

This seems like a political hit piece with no real substance. Salaries aren't going up because employers are conspiring to push down wages[0] and non executive wages in general are stagnating or going down[1]. Furthermore as already stated elsewhere in this thread, STEM degrees have huge wash out percentages so "freshmen enrolled" is just as good a statistic as "college freshman who plan on changing the world". The real problem, which has been repeated ad nauseam here, is that there's a shortage of STEM workers at the wages employers are willing to pay. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation [1] https://rwer.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/percent-change-in-u-s-real-wages…

ad hominem: https://rwer.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/pikettys-response-to-mankiw-et-a…

Given the problem is tax receipts collapsing, why has the government changed the rules to make it easier for companies to avoid paying tax in the UK? There is a limit to what can be considered pure incompetence. This looks more deliberately malign. https://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/rwer-issue-57-richard-murphy/

Spain has a higher productivity per employed worker than Germany, however since the collapse of the construction industry they have rampant unemployment. The Spanish are not lazy, although your argument certainly is. http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/southern-european-workers-versus-… http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/jobs-and-productivity-in-spain-20…

There's actually a fair amount of drama around why this is! https://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/the-nobel-family-dissociates-its… Apparently, when the Riksbank decided it wanted to publicly fund a prize for the category, the verbosity of the name of the prize was a concession to distance it from the other simply-named Nobel Prizes, funded by the family. > What was the position of the Nobel family? Three days before the meeting of April 26, the then director of the Nobel Foundation, Nils Ståhle, met two members of the family and telephonically talked with a third one. Their position was that “it should not become like a sixth Nobel Prize”, but that if the economics prize could be kept clearly separate from the Nobel Prizes then it might be an acceptable idea. > They obtained her written approval of the economics prize “under given conditions,” namely that the new prize in all official documents and statements should be kept separated from the Nobel prize, and called the “prize in economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel.” In a telephonic conversation with a nephew, Martha Nobel said that the whole thing was prearranged and impossible to oppose, so that one could only hope that they would keep their pledge that no confusion with the real Noble prize should occur. > What has happened is an unparalleled example of successful trademark infringement. However, nobody in the world can prevent journalists, economists and the general public from…

The evidence is in your favor where the CEO compensation just went up, up, up even as they used every justification in the world to pay workers less. The workers whose actions generated the revenues. https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/ In most companies I've worked, the CEO's mostly just made simple or random choices based on what data people under them were producing. The companies with established models could mostly run on autopilot. They have at times in between senior management or executives. There's also been little evidence their performance is tied to their pay much outside financial manipulations with many taking golden parachutes on way out of companies doing poorly. Add in the interlocking boards effect on compensation grants, you have every reason to believe the pay gap is an artificial construct by a privileged few to further enrich themselves at the expense of the many. These other explanations are either of little effect or smoke screens to keep people from attacking the root causes of what their doing. It's not like they hide it when talking among themselves that this is a system designed for the exclusive benefit of the rich as much as they can make it. See the leaked Citigroup memos about the plutonomy and such that they tried to take off the Internet. https://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2011/12/citigroup-plutonomy-memos-… Particularly relevant is what's in report No 3 here showing economic inequality wasn't…