On Thursday Noah put up a brief post on the Market Priesthood. It relates the story of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, of Freakonomics fame, meeting David Cameron, of Coalition Government fame. Levitt and Dubner tried to persuade Cameron that health care was just like any other part […]
The spectrum of response to this week’s Post-Crash Economics Society report on economics education – or their more specific proposal on a module panics and bubbles – has been intriguing, if not entirely unexpected. Some economists have welcomed the students’ aspirations for greater critical engagement with the material […]
Since the Global Financial Crisis questions have been asked about the adequacy of dominant approaches to economic analysis. Are they sufficient to help us understand the economy or do they need supplementing or reformulating? This is an important question for policy not simply because of the debate over […]
A little late in the day I’ve just finished Adair Turner’s Economics after the crisis: objectives and means, published in 2012. It is based on Turner’s 2010 Lionel Robbins lectures. Economics after the crisis is a thoughtful book which makes a number of relatively simple but profound points. The […]
Yesterday Noah Smith discussed whether economists’ ideas and arguments have much of an influence on policy and practice. He used an edited version of a famous quote from Keynes as his jumping off point. He then considered whether we can credibly claim that any living economist has significant […]
The council tax is unlovely and unloved. It was rushed into being as a replacement for the hated poll tax. Its structure has always been an uncomfortable compromise, somewhere between a charge for services and a genuinely progressive property tax. The property values upon which it is based […]
These days it seems we’re more likely to hear politicians talk about a “cost-of-living crisis” or, possibly, allude to problems of housing affordability than we are to find them discussing “poverty”. Indeed, we’re back in an era where the whole concept of poverty, and whether there are any […]
Over the last couple of days two of the big beasts of the economics blogosphere have offered views on a question of considerable significance for the field of macroeconomics. On Friday Simon Wren-Lewis discussed whether New Keynesians made a Faustian pact when they decided to engage new classical […]
I have to admit I found the whole situation rather discomfiting. Yesterday I found myself agreeing with George Osborne. Of course, as David Gillon (@WTBDavidG) pointed out on Twitter, we can all join George Osborne in agreeing that Iain Duncan-Smith is not perhaps the sharpest knife in the […]
Much of the media reporting of today’s IPPR briefing note on the economic recovery focused on the alarm it sounds about the rapid increase in household debt – in particular the risk that Help to Buy II will further increase house prices. The economy may give the appearance […]
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