Thomas Ferguson is the Research Director at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Senior Fellow at Better Markets. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and taught formerly at MIT and the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Golden Rule (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Right Turn (Hill & Wang, 1986). His articles have appeared in many scholarly journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Economic History. He is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Political Economy and a longtime Contributing Editor at The Nation.
Thomas Ferguson
By this expert
Bankman-Fried, Political Money, and the Crash of FTX
How Showering Money on Both Parties Paralyzed Regulators
Worker’s Wages & Leverage Are the Real Targets
Why did Corporate Democrats “cede” the economic argument? Are they really fighting inflation or trying to weaken workers’ bargaining power? INET’s Thomas Ferguson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news.
Trump and the Republican Base: A Machine Learning Approach
Economic issues are a primary part of Trump’s appeal to his base
How Inflation Reduction Became Export Promotion
Thomas Ferguson’s commentary for an INET symposium on the Inflation Reduction Act
Featuring this expert
Thomas Ferguson's article is featured in the International Economy Magazine
“The much-touted “new thinking” on fiscal policy and debt is actually very thin and little of it is new. In the 1990s, economist Luigi Pasinetti clarified the folly of the proposed Maastricht criteria for public finances and forecast the coming disaster with those. Subsequently, many economists, including more than a few working with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, showed in detail how austerity reduces potential output over time and how absurd theories about Phillips Curve trade-offs lead to big underestimates of real rates of unemployment. Running below full employment for long periods blows big holes in public finances and thus piles on debt.” – Thomas Ferguson
Survey Bias May Underestimate Unemployment, Particularly Among Young Black Men With Julie Yixia Cai, Dean Baker, William Spriggs, and John Schmitt. Moderated by INET’s Thomas Ferguson
Join us for this lively and timely presentation, followed by Q&A.
Linear Relationship Between Money and Election Outcomes Continued in 2020
INET’s Research Director Thomas Ferguson discusses the latest analysis he and his colleagues have conducted of campaign spending in the 2020 election cycle. The result dispels the myth that money has lost significance and that Republicans were at a significant disadvantage.
Noam Chomsky discusses INET research into money and politics on Jacobin
“One place to look always is where’s the money? Who funds congress? Actually, there’s a very fine careful study of this by the leading scholar who deals with funding issues in politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study about a year ago a careful study in which they investigated a simple question, “what’s the correlation over the years many years between campaign funding and electability to congress?” It’s almost a straight line, it’s the kind of close correlation that you barely get in the social sciences. The greater the funding, the higher the electability. You can find a few cases here and there that aren’t right on the line, but from the standpoint of social science it’s a remarkable correlation.” — Noam Chomsky, Jacobin