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Understanding QE3

Ok, time to deal with the elephant in the room: when is one theory better than the other? What is progress in economics?

The transatlantic conference has been moving targets: sociology went first, then economics, then history, today it was political science and international relations.

It’s not everyday that one finds economists using history as not just the right way but the only way to answer a question.

The U.S., in aggregate, acts as a bank to the rest of the world. The precise role of that bank has evolved over the course of the crisis.

Our interviews in the halls of the Mount Washington Hotel, covered the range of opinion about the severity of conflicts of interest in economics: we are alright; economics is no more corrupted than other sciences; corruption is substantial; it is rotten to the core.

The first graph shows US financial flows over the past five years.

The Marshall Lectures often provide thought provoking talks and one talk in particular spoke to me looking at the relationship between history and economics:

One silence, and one silo

Last June at a History of Social Science workshop , David Engerman presented a paper on the Harvard’s Refugee Interview Project (1950-1954).

On this blog, we like to overstate quite a bit our irreverence towards the establishment and in particular our senior colleagues.

In response to the walkout staged by students in the intro economics class at Harvard, the Institute launched the syllabus project, 30 Ways to Teach Economics.

To celebrate its 100 years of publishing, the AER published a special issues, whose retrospective part consisted of a list of the 20 most important articles, assembled by a committee which included Kenneth J. Arrow, B. Douglas Bernheim, Martin S. Feldstein, Daniel L. McFadden, James M. Poterba, and Robert M. Solow, and an essay on the history of the AER by Robert A. Margo.

Months ago, I got a message from a friend that was a swift and excited line: Errol Morris was writing a series of posts about science, even more remarkable about Thomas Kuhn.

I am late to the party on the inventive use of copper by Chinese companies seeking alternative sources of funds.