Articles
Articles and analyses from the INET community on the key economic questions of our time.
Behind Europe's Populist Backlash: The Hunger Games of Mainstream Economics
The turmoil of Brexit and the populist challenge across Europe are consequences of austerity policies that have brought misery to millions of ordinary voters. In this interview first published last January, Servaas Storm warned of the dangers of economic decision making divorced from democracy and from the social consequences of its prescriptions
They called it a sunspot
Why Keynes is Important Today
Nobel Win Doesn’t Equate To Policy Prescriptions
The “keys under the streetlight story” is well known among economists, but in case you haven’t heard it, it goes like this.
What Apple Should Do with Its Massive Piles of Money
An Open Letter to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
The Flummery of Capital-Requirement Repairs Since The Crisis
Government safety nets give protected institutions an implicit subsidy and intensify incentives for value-maximizing boards and managers to risk the ruin of their firms. Standard accounting statements do not record the value of this subsidy and forcing subsidized institutions to show more accounting capital will do little to curb their enhanced appetite for tail risk.
Destabilizing A Stable Crisis
Self-Control and Public Pensions
HES 2014: It made a happy man very old!
This year, the History of Economics Society (HES) meeting was organized at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The meeting was, on the whole, a nice affair, there were plenty of interesting sessions, I reconvened with old friends and was able to present there my latest work and receive constructive comments.
The Nature of Invention
The Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford researchers and collaborators data mine 200 years of US Patent Office records to uncover the true nature of innovation.
We Can Blog it!
Charles Babbage and the History of Innovative Thinking
The forthcoming Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. When we think about innovation we tend to imagine the future. But as with so many subjects in economics, it’s also useful to examine the past.
Kapital for the Twenty-First Century?
What is “capital”? To Karl Marx, it was a social, political, and legal category—the means of control of the means of production by the dominant class. Capital could be money, it could be machines; it could be fixed and it could be variable. But the essence of capital was neither physical nor financial. It was the power that capital gave to capitalists, namely the authority to make decisions and to extract surplus from the worker.
Thomas Scheiding: A history of scholarly communication in economics
We invited Thomas Scheiding from Cardinal Stritch University to review what we know about the scholarly communication process in economics. Tom has written forcefully on the history and economics of economic literature (see for instance, his 2009 JEM article). His latest is a study of the scholarly communication process in physics (an article in Studies).