A few days ago at Quartz.com Allison Schrager posted The single most important thing an economics course can teach you. It never becomes entirely clear what the single most important thing is. But it is possible that it is the need to study economic history alongside economy theory, […]
Last week I found myself discussing – indeed partially defending – economics in the face of somewhat indiscriminate accusations of “neoliberalism”. I have no doubt that some economists – while rarely self-defining as “neoliberal” – find themselves in sympathy with the political project that is usually signified by […]
Where is the revolutionary thinking in economics? That was one of the first questions posed by a speaker at the Festival of Economics held last weekend in a very damp Bristol. It is also one of the most pressing and the most intriguing. I was among the hardy […]
Over at Noahpinion last week a post on the role of maths in economics generated plenty of comment.* This followed the award of the “Nobel Prize” in Economics to Shapley and Roth for work that is, in almost anyone’s book, highly mathematical. Noah Smith identified a number of […]
Last Wednesday Suzanne Moore posted a Guardian comment piece entitled Why do we take economists so seriously? which takes a rather scatter-gun approach to some familiar themes. The argument, in outline, is that the economy is in a mess and this is primarily because we have been hoodwinked […]
Economists, one might assume, have something useful to say about the current problems afflicting the world economy. Yet, since the crash of 2008 there has been a considerable amount of reflection in parts of the discipline about its failure to anticipate the crash and its failure to offer […]
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