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Our welfare depends not only on our actual consumption, but also on alternate choices wedid not make.

This year, the History of Economics Society (HES) meeting was organized at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The meeting was, on the whole, a nice affair, there were plenty of interesting sessions, I reconvened with old friends and was able to present there my latest work and receive constructive comments.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford researchers and collaborators data mine 200 years of US Patent Office records to uncover the true nature of innovation.

The Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM) organises its 18th annual conference on Inequality and the Future of Capitalism with introductory lectures on heterodox economics for graduate students.

Can Economists Be Adequate Without Studying History?

Robert Skidelsky knocks the scientific halo off mainstream economists’ teaching and research

The more reflexive mode brought by the financial crisis to macroeconomics made economists more outspoken about methodological, historical and sociological issues: how have we come to the DSGE dogma? What are its limitations? How can we produce alternative knowledge? Do publishing practices favor a “monolithic” thinking, and if so, how can we change it? What about the graduate training in economics?

In late 2007, the United States started feeling the effects of the Great Recession. And over the ensuing two years the economic disaster spread across the globe.

There is a new economics rock-star touring the US by all accounts, and his name is Thomas Piketty.

The forthcoming Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. When we think about innovation we tend to imagine the future. But as with so many subjects in economics, it’s also useful to examine the past.

What is “capital”? To Karl Marx, it was a social, political, and legal category—the means of control of the means of production by the dominant class. Capital could be money, it could be machines; it could be fixed and it could be variable. But the essence of capital was neither physical nor financial. It was the power that capital gave to capitalists, namely the authority to make decisions and to extract surplus from the worker.

The “economics and engineering” line of argument is part of economists’ rhetoric.