economics

I have received several E-mails over the last few weeks that suggest that the economics discipline is finally changing course to redress the major flaws in the curricula that is taught around the world and that perhaps Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) can take some credit for some of that. There has been a tendency for…

. This is a fair presentation and critique of Austrian methodology. But beware! In theoretical and methodological questions it is not always either-or. We have to be open-minded and pluralistic enough not to throw out the baby with the bath water — and fail to secure insights like this: What is the problem we wish […]

Political economy has long taken a keen interest in the politics of economic ideas, but considerably less attention has been paid to the politics of economic method. Method gets neglected as the technical realm within which, it is assumed economic ideas, once established, are implemented in straightforward fashion. In fact, economic method and technique are in fact key sites in […]

Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common […]

I was asked during an interview the other day from Paris whether I was a Post Keynesian. I replied not at all and explained that I have never felt that my ideas fit into that category although in a facile sense we are all post keynesian in a temporal sense. Most progressive economists would answer…

Franco Modigliani famously quipped that he did not think that unemployment during the Great Depression should be described, in an economic model, as a “sudden bout of contagious laziness”. Quite. For the past thirty years we have been debating whether to use classical real business cycle models (RBC), or their close cousins, modern New Keynesian […]

The power structures within the profession reinforce the mainstream in different ways, including through the tyranny of so-called top journals and academic and professional employment. Such pressures and incentives divert many of the brightest minds from a genuine study of the economy (to try to understand its workings and the implications for people) to what can […]

Despite the rise of behavioral economics, many economists still believe that utility maximization is a good explanation of human behavior. Although evidence from experimental economics and elsewhere has rolled back the assumption that human agents are entirely self-interested, and shown that altruism and cooperation are important, a prominent response has been to modify individual preference […]

. Ett av de grundläggande feltänken i dagens diskussion om statsskuld och budgetunderskott är att man inte skiljer på skuld och skuld. Även om det på makroplanet av nödvändighet är så att skulder och tillgångar balanserar varandra, så är det inte oväsentligt vem som har tillgångarna och vem som har skulderna. Länge har man varit motvillig att öka de […]

Teaching economics students the fundamentals of the utility theory used in mainstream economics is a bit of a challenge. But I guess we all expect the professors to know what they are teaching … At a meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA), 200 of the professional economists present were asked to answer the following […]