Archive

How do we create a “change in culture”?

New topics and approaches make their way into two recent conferences on the history of economics

Margaret Heffernan on her latest book, A Bigger Prize: Why Competition Isn’t Everything And How We Do Better

Yes, it is a tale of two nations, but in a much broader way than you think. Not just England and Scotland, but an equally salient parallel between Great Britain and Canada.

Remarks from Finance & Society May 6, 2015

Most sociologists believe that formal and informal institutions are more critical in explaining the rising inequality observed in advanced economies. In this light, changing institutions such as the ascendance of shareholder-centered corporate governance model, finance-friendly policies since the late 70s, credentialism, and deunionization all contribute to the earnings dynamics at different parts of the distribution.

Writing the history of economic journals is not merely a way to reconstruct the development of new fields and new approaches to economics. It also recasts current debates on peer-review, retractions, open-access, replicability, and bias in scientific publishing in a wider perspective. It answers important questions on the influence of editors, publishers and referees on the development or marginalization of various economic approaches. But such endeavour requires the preservation of journals’ archives, the recognition of historical expertise, and economists’ adoption of a more relaxed and humble approach to their history.

Economists and historians of economics have constructed different (and sometimes conflicting) narratives about the past of their field. In fact what is history for economists may not be what is history for historians. To celebrate its 125th anniversary, the Economic Journal invited renowned economists to discuss important contributions published in the past by the journal and the works on similar topics by historians of economics are absent from these accounts. History of economics here seems to have the weight of a JEL descriptor attached to an invited contribution, which we ought to agree that it is not much.

It Could Fall On You.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking responds to an evident need for innovative approaches to understanding economic and financial processes.

Emulate Richard Feynman: Lean over backwards so you do not fool yourself, and teach your students the discipline correctly from the start, rather than teaching them things at the start you will have to unteach them later.

At least the Labour Party has only promised to cut day-to-day spending, not public investment.