Archive

Before reforming economics, we need to reform the discourse.

Ever since 2008, increasing numbers of economists, students, and even market professionals have protested the way economics is currently taught and practiced.

Readers of Minsky are familiar with the idea that governments should act as financial stabilizing agents for their economies by running surpluses in times of boom and deficits in times of crises.

The glass ceiling is typically examined in terms of the distribution of earnings. This column discusses the glass ceiling in the gender distribution of total incomes, including self-employment and capital income. Evidence from Canada and the UK shows we are still far from equality. Though the proportion of women in the top 1% has been rising, the progress is slower, almost non-existent, at the very top of the distribution.

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.