There is much that is troubling about George Osborne’s proposal to oblige future governments to run a budget surplus in normal times. There is the small matter of identifying “normal” times. It implies something important about how one is thinking about the macreconomy. What does “normal” look like? […]
Nick Clegg has a rather extraordinary post at the Telegraph today. The second half of the post is pretty standard: the Libdems are less spendthrift than Labour and less ideologically anti-state than the Conservatives. Split the difference and aim for the sensible centre. But in order to grab […]
Academic economists are smart people. In my experience, a few are rather too self-consciously smart. And one or two adopt the characteristic economist persona – perpetual patronisation of, and impatience with, those unfortunate souls working in the lesser social sciences – without obviously having the track record to […]
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 […]
A couple of weeks ago Martin Wolf blogged on the way in which modern macroeconomics has neglected the explicit and integrated treatment of the financial sector. The consequences of this omission have turned out to be of enormous practical significance. It left analysis mostly blind to a range […]
When I first studied macroeconomics the Stagflation era of the 1970s and the death of Keynesianism were still being quite hotly debated. They were still contemporary events. Well, they were contemporary events in the way that the election of Tony Blair is a contemporary event for us today […]
The more I think about economic policy the more I think that there isn’t a big enough dose of interpretivism applied to it. This thought recurred yesterday reading George Osborne’s set piece speech in which he, as Isabel Hardman of the Spectator put it, “trashed” Plan B. I […]
Next weekend Bristol will host the Festival of Economics, organised under the auspices of the Festival of Ideas. The programme for the Festival of Economics has been assembled by Diane Coyle of Enlightenment Economics. It brings together economic journalists, applied academic economists, and economists in the think tank […]
There was a bit of social media sniping yesterday that, despite David Cameron’s protestations to the contrary, the Queen’s Speech didn’t contain much of any substance to help the ailing UK economy. That doesn’t seem to me to be entirely fair, for two reasons. First, there were some […]
The desirability of free capital movement is an article of faith for the international organisations that seek to govern the global economy. The perspective is shared by the governments of most developed countries. Liberalisation of capital markets is typically part of the medicine prescribed to ailing countries. A […]
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