Articles

How economists turned to the study of collective decision-making after World War II, faced many impossibilities, and lost interest after solving them

Inflation, the euro crisis – for years there has been one worry hype after another. Yet fear frequently turns out to be wrong. We need a committee of wise men in charge of dealing with the real risks.

In the past month, analysts from all disciplines have tried to make sense out of shooting deaths of blacks by police and also ambush attacks of police.

The economic historian would have seen the British vote to leave the European Union as part of a larger drama of centralization versus pluralism

No, it’s not bureaucracy that is to blame - It’s the EU that has a problem, because urged by Germany it has pushed a kind of naive globalization, the outgrowths of which contribute to the upswing of dim-witted populists. Not only in the EU. Time for a new paradigm.

Remarks at a memorial service for pioneering financial analyst Jack Treynor Memorial, MIT Chapel, June 19, 2016

Some predict global economic catastrophe if Britain votes to leave the EU, others foresee a more limited set of consequences — and some see a telling trend in the public ignoring economists’ warnings

Anxiety over human labor being replaced by cyborgs may be in vogue, but it’s overblown — machines may help us achieve healthier and more meaningful lives

The Institute is proud to welcome the revival of an indispensable resource for those seeking to understand the evolution of economics in context

From 1958 onward, the back cover of Paul Samuelson’s bestselling textbook, Economics, showed a family-tree of economists. The diagram’s evolution, in particular its use of the term “mainstream economics,” reflected, and, I speculate, influenced how economists came to perceive the structure of their discipline.