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Are there more poor people on our planet today than there were last year? Many economists would approach this question as mainly a technical problem, a matter of counting.

To cure unemployment, mostly we prime the pump: we devise fiscal strategies on the presumption that jobs follow economic growth. But the strategies have not worked, unemployment remains high.

The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World

Most “state of the art” macro models trivialize financial flows and largely neglect the interaction between finance and industry. That is why they failed at predicting and illuminating the collapse of the Irish economy.

Cosma Shalizi urges economists to stop doing what they are doing: Fitting large complex models to a small set of highly correlated time series data.

In 2006, the Fed asked its macroeconometric model what would happen if house prices dropped by 20%. The model projected the past into the future and said: “Not much.” Well, the financial crisis proved it wrong.

Banks take on excessive risk since they know, in case of failure, the taxpayer will step in to rescue them. That is a form of free insurance, and Ed Kane wants to end it.

Innovation drives economic growth and welfare, and the industrial corporation drives innovation, says William Lazonick. But just how do corporations innovate?

When externalities are present and transaction costs are absent, private parties will strike welfare-enhancing deals regardless of who owns what. In a frictionless world, bargaining leads to efficiency. That is the essence of the Coase Theorem, and it is fiction, according to Steven Medema.

The physicist Sorin Solomon begins to feel dizzy when the economist Leanne Ussher talks econ lingo. Yet he listens, because the two of them have found a productive area of collaboration: some economic phenomena, they find, can be explained without recourse to the quirks that feed into human decision making.

The Nobel Memorial Prize defines high achievement in economics, and it validates the discipline’s claim for scientific authority. And yet, historically, it can be understood as a reflection of domestic policy conflicts in Sweden.

We all know it: The financial sector is bloated and banks are too big to fail. But just how bloated is it, and how much should it be shrunk?

An individual fish reduces the danger to itself by swimming as close as possible to the center of the school. That is how schools hold together.

Without law and legal institutions, financial markets won’t work. That’s what economists discovered about 15 years ago, when former socialist countries turned towards capitalism.

Paul Samuelson was both a mathematical micro-economist, working from theorem to proof in the neoclassical tradition, and a committed Keynesian macroeconomist, convinced of the necessity of policy intervention to improve the performance of market economies. How did he square these two sides of himself? Wade Hands goes into the archives to find out.