The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
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Re: The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
#2"... the academic review of published work on the minimum wage, which opponents of the minimum wage use most frequently in defence of their position, had actually said it couldn’t find strong evidence that the minimum wage caused unemployment"
Re: The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
#3This is a good article. But it's too kind to contemporary economics. Contemporary economics especially neoliberalism is simply a pseudo-scientific justification for crushing workers rights globally and maximizing profits for those at the very top.
Economists told us for decades that wages are tied to productivity, when all the data points in the exact opposite direction. Economists told us that opening up developing countries' markets would result in their development and increase in standard of living. How's that going in 2022?
Re: The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
#4This is a good article. But it's too kind to contemporary economics. Contemporary economics especially neoliberalism is simply a pseudo-scientific justification for crushing workers rights globally and maximizing profits for those at the very top. Economists told us for decades that wages are tied to productivity, when all the data points in the exact opposite direction. Economists told us that opening up developing…
Hasnt the economic story of 2020-2022 so far has not been "lets see what happens when we open up" but rather "lets see what happens when we close down"?
How does 2022 so far imply to you negative evidence of "here's what happens when you open economies?" I am sincerely curious.
Re: The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
#5This is a good article. But it's too kind to contemporary economics. Contemporary economics especially neoliberalism is simply a pseudo-scientific justification for crushing workers rights globally and maximizing profits for those at the very top. Economists told us for decades that wages are tied to productivity, when all the data points in the exact opposite direction. Economists told us that opening up developing…
> How's that going in 2022?
It's brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty [0], drastically increased their life expectancies [1], and significantly improved their chances of making it to adulthood [2].
For more, see https://www.gapminder.org.
[0] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$encodin...
[1] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$encodin...
[2] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$encodin...
Re: The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
#6The sections of this article which are descriptions of current work being done by several Clark medal winners are reasonably accurate and fair summaries.
The rest is a complete mess written by someone who is uninformed at best. The discussion of tobacco taxes and the discussion of wages in the Premier League are both particularly bad. Please don't take it seriously as a description of what's going on in the field or what the current problems are.
When I teach my freshman undergrads supply and demand in two weeks I will make very clear to them that we do not have that much empirical support for the claim that minimum wages increase unemployment and that it is an unsettled question. This is the first college-level economics class they will take in our department and I am going to make sure they understand that point. I would be willing to bet that nearly every one of my colleagues teaching similar classes throughout the US and abroad will do the same when they discuss minimum wage policies.
Re: The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
#7"The law of supply and demand" is never going to fit everything the way the law of gravity does. It's a rough guideline that applies to artificial models better than it does to the real world.
It seems like economists need to admit it when a minimum wage law don't have the effect they think it "should" instead of stubbornly insisting they're right.
However, you can tell a "journalist" wrote this...
>Isaiah Andrews, one of these new ‘empiricists’, won the 2021 John Bates Clark Medal – the most distinguished economics prize in the United States. Andrews has worked on the problem of publication bias – whereby research that confirmed prior beliefs could have a better chance of being accepted by academic journals
I don't see what this has to do with supply & demand. "Confirmation bias" is more of a social science study area, not economics.
> In 2020, the UK government appointed Mark Carney – a former governor at the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England – as climate change adviser. Carney was quick to declare the problem to be essentially a mispricing of the cost of emitting carbon. Neither Sunstein nor Carney are experts in climate economics, let alone climate change.
Whatever "climate economics" is and how it differs from just "economics."
> The problem is one I call ‘free lunch thinking’. Milton Friedman popularised the saying that there was ‘no such thing as a free lunch’, yet his worldview was that, if government just stepped back – didn’t spend money solving problems, didn’t trouble itself with regulation, and left all the messy decisions around how to organise society to the ‘market’ – things would hum along and we’d all get richer magically. That sounds a lot like a free lunch.. [italics added]
No, it's not "free lunch thinking." It's describing how laws work. It's not magic if you turn on the burner under the teakettle and the water gets hot.
> Yet there is no reason why adhering to the scientific method of basing conclusions and world views on observable facts should be more challenging in economics than in physics. Except that the incentives are against it. If you have a dogmatic neoclassical view of how the world works, you’ll always have a solution to the economic problem of the day.
Actually, there IS a reason: in physics you can do experiments quite easily, and in the social sciences and economics, you can't. Thus Freakonomics and successor books focus on "natural experiments," like the two school districts in Canada whose boundaries seem to be randomly drawn. Minimum wage increases in one state or city are not a natural experiment.
Re: The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
#8This is a good article. But it's too kind to contemporary economics. Contemporary economics especially neoliberalism is simply a pseudo-scientific justification for crushing workers rights globally and maximizing profits for those at the very top. Economists told us for decades that wages are tied to productivity, when all the data points in the exact opposite direction. Economists told us that opening up developing…
> Economists told us for decades that wages are tied to productivity, when all the data points in the exact opposite direction.
That's because the data is based on salary and wages, when the actual number used needs to be "total compensation". Total compensation also includes so-called "employer paid" benefits. It includes other costly mandates required by regulation.
The other problem is productivity increases are very uneven. Productivity for some jobs has gone way up, for others it has not changes. The latter are not going to see compensation increases if their individual productivity did not rise.
Re: The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
#9"The law of supply and demand" is never going to fit everything the way the law of gravity does. It's a rough guideline that applies to artificial models better than it does to the real world. It seems like economists need to admit it when a minimum wage law don't have the effect they think it "should" instead of stubbornly insisting they're right. However, you can tell a "journalist" wrote this... >Isaiah Andrews, o…
> in physics you can do experiments quite easily, and in the social sciences and economics, you can't.
Which is exactly why neither are actual science.
Re: The worldly turn: A return to economics that studies the real world
#10The sections of this article which are descriptions of current work being done by several Clark medal winners are reasonably accurate and fair summaries. The rest is a complete mess written by someone who is uninformed at best. The discussion of tobacco taxes and the discussion of wages in the Premier League are both particularly bad. Please don't take it seriously as a description of what's going on in the field or…
I graduated with an econ BSc from a Russel Group University in the UK, it was definitely not made clear where and where not there was actual empirical evidence for the conclusions of the neoclassical modelling we were taught. The state of syllabi around the world is a total embarrassment.