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A recent e-mail conversation I had with Harro Maas concerning one of my latest drafts (shameless self-promotion) made me buy and read Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s, Merchants of Doubts.

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

Professors Roger Backhouse and Brad Bateman wrote an op-ed for the New York Times a few days ago, arguing that “thanks to decades of academic training in the “dentistry” approach to economics, today’s Keynes or Friedman is nowhere to be found” - we have stopped thinking big they say.

The Toxic Textbooks movement devotes energy to curriculum reform as well. Its purpose is to galvanize student protests and “encourage schools and universities to use economics textbooks that engage honestly with the real world.”

This is the question I’m supposed to answer for an experimental INET conference aimed at inspiring new thinking through interdisciplinary conversation and collective reflection without rules.

Yesterday, Harvard students of Ec 10 staged a walkout to draw attention to the bias they detect in the course.

My first TV chat show performance:

In the case of utility, it’s all in the name.

The crisis has exposed the failure of economic models to deal sensibly with endogenously generated crises propagating from the financial sectors to the real economy, and back again.

Okay, so here is the statement, but what does it mean? Felix Salmon offers an unnamed advisor’s flowchart. Let’s see if Money View thinking can do better.

Last week Goldman Sachs published a note in favor of the Fed’s adopting a formal nominal GDP target, while Fed-watchers caught a whiff of a possible change in policy in the works.

Till is right. It’s not the historian’s task to question the legitimacy of the decisions of the Nobel Committee.

Goodhart brings back on the table the 2% minimalist federal fiscal counterpart to monetary union: “As has been exemplified in the recent crisis, it is problematical to try to issue money without the power to support that via taxation. Equally without access to money (notably via taxes), the power to undertake counter-cyclical, or cross-country, stabilisation is limited. So, the second proposal is to revisit the exercise that was done, some twenty years ago, to assess what fiscal changes might be needed to accompany a single currency.”

It’s Nobel Prize time again. And what a beautiful prize this year it is!