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Adam Smith’s modern fame as the founding father of economics has, until relatively recently, obscured the fact that he saw himself as a moral philosopher.

The road towards a decent society; lessons from classical political economy

Growing income inequality is threatening the American middle class, and the middle class is vanishing before our eyes. We are still one country, but the stretch of incomes is fraying the unity of our nation.

The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism Guy Standing We are in the midst of a Global Transformation, analogous to Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation described in his seminal 1944 book. Whereas Polanyi’s Transformation was about constructing national market systems, today’s is about the painful construction of a global market system. To use Polanyi’s term, the ‘dis-embedded’ phase has been dominated by an ideology of market liberalisation, commodification and privatisation, orchestrated by financial interests, as in his model. The similarities also extend to today’s fundamental challenge, how to construct a ‘re-embedded’ phase, with new systems of regulation, distribution and social protection.

In the economic literature, several scholars have addressed the narrative of a two-stage European crisis. In a first stage, the so-called “he-cession”, men would have been hit the most by the economic recession induced by the financial crisis. Shortly thereafter, in the “she-austerity” stage, women would have suffered the heaviest burdens of the fiscal retrenchment measures. If that were the case, the policy response to the crisis would be producing an increase in the – already high pre-existing – gender inequality.

“Dual Economy” models were developed to explain growth in the developing world. Now they appear necessary to comprehend the high income trap that afflicts the world’s most developed economies.

Rob Johnson kicks off INET’s “Reawakening” conference with his take on how economists can win back the trust of a world that has rejected experts

This paper aims to assess such tendency to return to a supply-determined potential output, independent of aggregate demand, after episodes of demand expansion.

Preliminary draft prepared for INET conference session “A Decade of Stagnation. Why?”

What explains the slow recovery from the financial crisis and great recession in so much of the world?

Nicola Sturgeon covers a range of topics including how economists’ work relates to policymaking, the financial crisis and the dangers of groupthink, how dissatisfaction with stagnating wages and rising inequality played into political shocks like Brexit, the legacy of Adam Smith, why new economic thinking is so important, and what her government is doing to foster and apply it. 

This article originally appeared on Bloomberg

INET gathered hundreds of new economic thinkers in Edinburgh to discuss the past, present, and future of the economics profession.

What can today’s economists learn from the 18th century Scottish thinkers who grappled with societal and economic change?

Animal rights, child welfare, social equality are all a direct legacy of the “cult of feeling”