Articles

Paper revised for the Institute’s Plenary Conference in Berlin

On my way back home from the Brandenburger Tor, I recalled that I already have been there, it must have been in 1988.

A suprisingly large number of talks refer to the issue of human decision making.

In his notorious “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong” NYT article in 2009, Paul Krugman relied on the freshwater/saltwater distinction to explain that the economists’ inability to predict and solve the current economics crisis was due to the fact that MIT/Harvard economics lost their long dispute against their Chicagoan counterparts.

In recent years, an increasingly significant part of the history of economics has modeled itself after the methodologies developed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars.

The title is the same as that of Maury Obstfeld’s Ely Lecture, delivered Jan 6 at the AEA meetings in Chicago. Yours truly was at the meetings mainly to deliver a paper on “Three Principles for Market-Based Credit Regulation”, about which more in a later post. And for most of the rest of the time I was locked in a hotel room interviewing candidates for an assistant professor slot at Barnard College (which gave me a good overview of the current state of macroeconomics, again fodder for a later post).

The fact of the matter is that European bank funding markets are collapsing onto the ECB balance sheet.

My friend read somewhere that the experience of death makes people think in philosophical terms. He might have thought of religion rather than philosophy, I replied. We agreed, and wandered off talking about our crypto-religious experiences in good old secular Europe.

The following text was sent to us by Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman, we reproduce it in its entirety.