Archive
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Article
Blending the Economy and Science
Nov 5, 2012
For one more time traveling closer to home – Mainz! It’s been the annual meeting of the German Society of the History of Science (the kind of academic club one has to be nominated for membership).
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Article
To teach or not to teach economics with The Wire?
Nov 1, 2012
So, my new students’ training is essentially about understanding urban “territories” and “societies” through fieldwork. And my contribution is, supposedly, to highlight the economic dimension of all this.
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Article
What should every non-econ student know about economics?
Oct 30, 2012
When they told me I was expected to teach “Introduction à l’économie” this year, I thought, OK, this is straight. Every economist knows how to do that.
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Video
A Conversation on the Economy
Oct 24, 2012
What do you get when you put two of the most well known and most widely cited economists in the world, both Nobel laureates, on stage together? A healthy dose of economic reality.
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Article
The use of economists' biography, IV.
Sep 23, 2012
Excerpts from a draft introduction of Till Düppe’s and Roy Weintraub’s new book, under revision for Princeton University Press, presently carrying the working title “Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Transformation of Economic Theory
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Article
The use of economists' biography, III.
Sep 19, 2012
“The aim would not be to unravel a hidden coherent structure of the philosophical, theoretical, political dimensions of his work, but to give a sense of the contingencies that his work was subject to – both in terms of its origins and its receptions. Don’t make up an Arrow that he himself was not aware of.” -Till to me, email conversation on Kenneth Arrow, summer 2012
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Article
The use of economists' biography, II.
Sep 17, 2012
Excerpts from “Retrospect and Prospect,” the concluding remarks Bob Coats presented at (or maybe wrote after) the History of Economics conference held in 1972 at Bellagio to commemorate and reassess the 1870s “marginal revolution” (full proceedings here).
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Article
The use of economists' biography, I.
Sep 17, 2012
Robert Solow, “Notes on Coping.” In Szenberg ed. Eminent Economists: their Life Philosophy, 1992, p270
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Article
A Quick One (Message to Naomi)
Sep 13, 2012
Yesterday, I had my first introductory economics seminar with my new students.
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Article
Keynes's 10 Professors... and a Major
Sep 1, 2012
I thought I was on to an inside reference when re-reading the General Theory when Keynes calls Marx, Edgeworth and others simply by name, but refers to “Professor Pigou” in several instances.
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Article
Holiday announcements... History at the ASSA
Aug 21, 2012
Mid August, with the Olympics over, Paralympics and Premiership starting (that’s Soccer for the American readership), it is well and truly the quiet period for most of academia.
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Article
Leakage as historiographic genre @ HES 2012
Jul 26, 2012
If the meetings of European historians of economics are urbane and cosmopolitan, the meetings of American historians are, by contrast, frank and toilful.
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Article
Inclusive wealth and the history of GDP
Jul 16, 2012
The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) recently published the Inclusive Wealth Report 2012, in which the authors propose a measure of wealth based on the stock of capital present in a country, as opposed to the flow measure of GDP.
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Article
Interdisciplinarity and education @H2S workshop
Jul 10, 2012
A few weeks ago, I attended the H2S 4th workshop on “Cross disciplinary ventures in postwar American Social Sciences,” (research program outline here).
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Article
Economists Coming of Age
Jul 7, 2012
Last weekend, I was in Tübingen - very close to my home town: the same smell, the same surreal Swabian idyll that makes you think of Hölderlin and Hesse rather than DSGE.
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Article
The less you know, the better?
Jul 7, 2012
A few days ago, I began researching on the history of a subfield of economics which was born in the sixties, then thrived and institutionalized itself in the early seventies.
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Article
The Visible Hand Writing History
Jul 7, 2012
[We are inaugurating something new in this blog: a jointly written post!]
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Article
Economics and computation in the postwar period: managing scarcity
Jul 1, 2012
“We choose this stochastic structure for computational reasons. This reduces the dimension of the variables. With (such and such) alternative, the computational burden would have dramatically increased.”
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Working Paper
Grantee paperThe Making of America’s Imbalances
Jun 2012
This paper tracks the development of sectoral saving and borrowing in the US economy over the past 50 years.
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Article
Economics at Chicago, 1939-1955: the scope of our ignorance
Jun 26, 2012
The University of Chicago is well-known for as the place where a famous group of economists, including Milton Friedman, Georges Stigler, Gary Becker, among others, developed a method for analyzing economic facts based on Marshallian price theory, a vision of the evolution of macroeconomic aggregates called monetarism, and an approach to individual liberties and the role of the state known as (neo)liberalism.
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Article
Division of labour was common knowledge by the 1770s
Jun 23, 2012
I always think of Adam Smith when I hear the term ‘division of labour’ - but I’m being cured of this by reading a bit more about Britains late 18th century in Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men.
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Article
History of Economics Journals in SSCI - a correction
Jun 13, 2012
In a recent post I wrote: “I am sure it will not take long before Journal of the History of Economic Thought (Cambridge Uni. Press) makes that list [Thompson Reuters, Social Science Citation Index].”
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Article
Between science and history
Jun 11, 2012
Last Friday, philosophers from the University of Leiden hosted the symposium ‘Between Science and History,’ in an attempt to figure out what the differences are between practicing scientists’ use of history and historians use of history.
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Article
Three questions to Ivan Moscati: Historicizing Choice Theory
May 31, 2012
Ivan Moscati is one of the most exciting voices in the historiography of decision theory.
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Article
Let Us Praise Famous Men, or why we must praise them...
May 30, 2012
Steven Shapin is visiting the UK. For those unfamiliar with the history and sociology of science, he is one of the giants of the field.
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Article
Contextualizing one and other @ ESHET 2012
May 21, 2012
My attempt at a double riddle. “I find familiar faces only in unfamiliar places. Who am I? And whom are the faces?” The answer to the first is, I am an academic, to the second, my conference buddies.
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Article
Let me tell you everything
May 7, 2012
Our usual problem in history (of economics) is a lack of information.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperOld Lady Charm: Explaining the Persistent Appeal of Chicago Antitrust
Apr 2012
The paper deals with the mysterious persistence of the Chicago approach as the main analytical engine driving antitrust enforcement in the US.
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Article
Relativist versus absolutist history of economics
Apr 22, 2012
I don’t seem to be able to fully grasp Mark Blaug’s distinction between a relativist and an absolutist approach to the history of economics – first introduced in Economic Theory in Retrospect (1962) – and that is a source of much frustration.
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Article
Life Among the Econ: Talking history with Axel Leijonhufvud
Apr 18, 2012
Like many economists, I have enjoyed Axel Leijonhufvud’s “Life among the Econ” and nodded appreciatively when he described the social classifications of the Econ as “Grads, Adults and Elders” and chuckled when the young grad tries to impress the elders of the ‘dept’ through adept ‘modl’ building; so when the man himself was holding a glass of champagne and chatting with me at the INET conference, I had to ask how he got that paper started.
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Article
Feelings Offstage
Apr 15, 2012
INET Berlin 2012 - back home again. On stage, it’s been a huge amount of claims, assertions, and arguments about what went wrong, about what exactly happened, about why this time was different, about what will certainly happen, and about what remains deeply uncertain, about what “we” shall do about it, about what “we” could do better.
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Article
@INET Berlin: Paradigm Regained
Apr 14, 2012
The title of the conference, “Paradigm Lost,” is an obvious combination of two references.
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Working Paper
Conference paperRevitalizing the Eurozone without Fiscal Union
Apr 2012
The ongoing eurozone crisis has prompted many to argue that monetary union withoutfiscal union was bound to fail.
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Conference Session
Overhangs, Uncertainty and Political Order: Where Do We Go From Here?
Apr 13, 2012 | 03:15—05:15
Leading thinkers from outside the developed countries look to the future, spotlighting the pitfalls and opportunities thatawait us.
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Working Paper
Conference paperFinancial Instability after Minsky:Heterogeneity, Agent Based Models and Credit Networks
Apr 2012
Albeit the majority of the profession either ignores Minskyís Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) or considers it plainly wrong, at least since the mid-80’s a few influential economists —who have certainly not embraced any unorthodoxcredo —have grown more receptive to this idea and eager to incorporate it in their models, even if diluted and sometimes disguised in order to make it more palatable to the conventional “representative” macroeconomist
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Working Paper
Conference paperInstability in Financial Markets: Sources and Remedies
Apr 2012
In the seemingly never-ending aftermath to the economic crisis that began in 2007, there is little disagreement that financial markets are characterized by instability rather than stability.
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Article
Explaining 'New Economics' with Two Diagrams
Apr 13, 2012
I think I am on the track of what ‘New Economics’ is, and one could roughly sum up two days of presentations in two diagrams:
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Article
How to spend the $75m Janeway and Soros just gave to INET!?!
Apr 13, 2012
Lunch was just interrupted Bill Janeway standing up to announce that this morning he decided to give $25m to INET and the board will fund-raise this up to $100m over ten years, but then George Soros added $50m in unconditional funding for INET.
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Working Paper
Conference paperInstability in Financial Markets: Sources and Remedies The View from Economic History
Apr 2012
Taking a long‐run view from economic history, I make three points about instability in financial markets. First, I argue that economic historians have a relatively good understanding of the proximate causes of financial crises.
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Working Paper
Conference paperInequality and Employment
Apr 2012
“Natural rate theory” has dominated interpretations of economic trends and policy prescriptions over many decades. European-type welfare state institution were claimed to cause a compressed wage distribution that distorts otherwise well functioning labor markets.
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Working Paper
Conference paperMaterial intensity, productivity and economic growth
Apr 2012
Many models of economic growth exclude materials from the production function. Growing environmental pressures and resource prices suggest that this may be increasingly inappropriate.
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Working Paper
Conference paperDoes the Effectiveness of Fiscal Stimulus Depend on Economic Context?
Apr 2012
The topic of this session of the INET conference is a question: does the effectiveness of fiscal policy in stabilizing an economy depend on the underlying economic context in which the policy is implemented?
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Working Paper
Conference paperMoving Towards Climate Justice: Overcoming Barriers to Change
Apr 2012
The present paradox, as ecological economist Bill Rees is fond of putting it, is simple yet profoundly troubling: “The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant.”
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Conference Session
Does The Effectiveness of Fiscal Stimulus Depend on The Context? Balance Sheet Overhangs, Open Economy Leakages, and Idle Resources
Apr 13, 2012 | 10:15—12:05
The effectiveness of fiscal stimulus in promoting economic recovery appears to depend upon many factors.
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Conference Session
Instability in Financial Markets: Sources and Remedies
Apr 13, 2012 | 10:00—12:05
What creates instability in financial markets? How does the weight of debt, the structure of expectations, or radical uncertainty contribute to instability?
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Conference Session
Inequality and The Challenge of Employment
Apr 13, 2012 | 12:25—02:15
Inequality has been growing and destabilizing confidence in many countries in recent years.
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Conference Session
New Economics, Climate Change, and New Models of Growth
Apr 13, 2012 | 10:15—12:05
Evidence of climate change is widely accepted by scientists.
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Working Paper
Conference paperTowards an Ecological Macroeconomics
Apr 2012
Three major crises are confronting the world. The first is the increasing and uneven burden of humans on the biosphere, and the observation that we have already surpassed the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity with respect to three planetary boundaries: climate change, the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss.
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Conference Session
Managing the Global Commons: Growth, Inequality, and New Thinking for Sustainable Economics
Apr 13, 2012 | 03:45—05:35
How can we distribute growth globally when the developed world needs growth to emerge from debt overhangs and inequality between nations is still quite formidable?
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Video
The Future of Europe
Apr 12, 2012
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Conference Session
What Matters: Fundamental Challenges and Self inflicted Wounds
Apr 12, 2012 | 03:30—05:10
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Working Paper
Conference paperDebt Overhang and Capital Regulation
Apr 2012
We analyze shareholders’ incentives to change the leverage of a firm that has already borrowed substantially. As a result of debt overhang, shareholders have incentives to resist reductions in leverage that make the remaining debt safer.
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Working Paper
Conference paperThe Austerity Trap: A Century of Unrest and Budget Cuts
Apr 2012
Budget cuts can be dangerous. Inspired by the wrenching experience in Greece, increasing attention is now being paid to the fact that austerity may fail to reduce the government deficit if the economy declines in response, as is likely in a liquidity trap (Delong and Summers 2012).
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Conference Session
Is Mercantilism Doomed to Fail? China, Germany, and Japan and the Exhaustion of Debtor Countries
Apr 12, 2012 | 10:00—12:10
A country that produces goods of high quality at a competitive price is likely to be rewarded for its ingenuity with a trade surplus. Small countries often achieve great development success through export-led growth. At the same time, the entire economic system must be balanced.
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Working Paper
Conference paperThe Culprit of the Global Crisis – German Mercantilism!
Apr 2012
These are truly testing times. The world economic order – capitalism – is being called into question following the Lehman crisis. The world’s best form of societal organization – democracy – is being challenged by the economic success of autocratic countries such as China and Singapore.
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Conference Session
The Challenge of De-Leveraging and Debt Overhangs II : The Politics and Economics of Restructuring
Apr 12, 2012 | 06:15—08:05
When the very fabric of society is threatened by prolonged austerity or a financial sector collapse, a deliberate re-structuring of debt may be necessary to restore the hopes of renewed prosperity.
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Conference Session
The Challenge of De-leveraging and Overhangs of Debt I : Inflation and Austerity
Apr 12, 2012 | 03:45—05:55
After an era of vigorous expansion a downturn can reveal a large stock of debt relative to the economy’s capacity to service it.
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Conference Session
The Future of Europe
Apr 12, 2012 | 12:30—02:40
What has been learned now that the Euro zone’s fault lines have been revealed? Where are Europe and the Euro zone today?
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Conference Session
Reflections on the Politics of Deficit Reduction
Apr 12, 2012 - Apr 12, 2013 | 09:35—11:00
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Video
The Future of Europe
Apr 12, 2012
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Article
Manufacturing jobs will disappear - no matter where you are
Apr 12, 2012
Just as the agricultural share of employment has fallen from 40% in the 1920s to less than 2% of the workforce in Europe today, manufacturing’s share of employment will fall to less than 5% of employment.
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Article
@INET Berlin: Doing the actual work
Apr 12, 2012
While yesterday presented a number of frontrunning scientists discussing current economics and state of the economy in general, academic terms, today starts with ECB executive board member Asmussen.
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Article
@INET Berlin: The Great Divide
Apr 12, 2012
Behind all the technical language and the common theme of bashing bankers, there remains the Great Divide between Germans and the rest.
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Article
Kids Behind the Wall
Apr 12, 2012
On my way back home from the Brandenburger Tor, I recalled that I already have been there, it must have been in 1988.
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Article
@INET Berlin: Decisions
Apr 12, 2012
A suprisingly large number of talks refer to the issue of human decision making.
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Webinars and Events
Paradigm Lost
PlenaryNew Economic Thinking 2012
Apr 12–15, 2012
The Institute joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in hosting its third-annual plenary conference in Berlin from April 12-15, 2012.
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Working Paper
Conference paperChange and Expectations in Macroeconomic Models: Recognizing the Limits to Knowability
Apr 2012
In modern economies, individuals and companies engage in innovative activities, discovering new ways to use existing physical and human capital, and new technologies in which to invest. The institutional and broader social context within which these activities take place also changes in novel ways.
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Working Paper
Conference paperSovereignty Effects
Apr 2012
With my remarks today on financial markets and the financial crisis, I do not make any claims to originality. Rather, they are intended as a reminder of certain circumstances that are already familiar to us, in one form or another.
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Conference Session
Which Way Forward? Reflections on Global Turmoil and the Role of Markets, Governments, and Civil Society
Apr 11, 2012 | 09:20—11:30
The global economy is in turmoil. Societies are unstable and not anchored by faith in the system or social order.
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Conference Session
What Can Economists Know? Rethinking the Foundations of Economic Understanding
Apr 11, 2012 | 11:00—02:00
The economics profession stands on the fragile foundation of presuppositions adopted by professional agreement rather than as a result of empirical observation.
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Conference Session
Challenging the Foundations of Economic Thinking
Apr 11, 2012 | 06:25—07:45
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Conference Session
Paradigm Lost
Apr 11, 2012 | 09:15—10:15
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Conference Session
Welcome Remarks
Apr 11, 2012 | 07:00—07:25
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Article
Asking questions about paradigms and INET
Apr 11, 2012
Dinner has already rolled around on what has been a quick day.
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Article
Blogging Live from Berlin - Any Requests?
Apr 11, 2012
Just wanted to let you all know that amongst the distinguished, distinguishable and disturbing people at the INET conference we have inserted ourselves in the middle to do some interviews, attend talks and blog about what is going on.
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Article
Economics as a doctrinal discipline
Apr 11, 2012
In science, empirical disciplines such as physics, chemistry, history, and parts of sociology and political science, reason from facts.
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Article
From 1000AD to 1970 the History of World Trade is Based on Fact, After 1970, Fiction?
Mar 28, 2012
Having just started Findlay and O’Rourke’s mammoth history of world trade in the second millenia, I have been struck by a strange incongruity
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Article
UK Budget Appeals to Adam Smith's Approach to Taxes... Sort of
Mar 22, 2012
Yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer (or UK ‘finance minister’) gave his annual budget speech where UK fiscal policy is set for the coming years.
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Article
The Dynamics of the Chicago / MIT Dispute (in the Archives)
Mar 4, 2012
In his notorious “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong” NYT article in 2009, Paul Krugman relied on the freshwater/saltwater distinction to explain that the economists’ inability to predict and solve the current economics crisis was due to the fact that MIT/Harvard economics lost their long dispute against their Chicagoan counterparts.
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Article
The Dynamics of the Chicago / MIT Dispute (in the Archives)
Mar 4, 2012
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Article
Three Questions to Judy Klein
Feb 27, 2012
Judy Klein is Professor of Economics at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She is the author of Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis 1662-1938, (Cambridge 1997) and co-editor of The Age of Economic Measurement (Duke 2001), and co-author of The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (in preparation)
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Article
Professor Ponzi, or thinking about the methodology, the sociology and the economics of economics
Feb 8, 2012
I am writing from my notes. The event I want to report took place some two months ago, I have since been preoccupied, then occupied, and now increasingly overwhelmed.
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Article
Marion Fourcade and historians of economics: a quiet revolution?
Jan 15, 2012
In recent years, an increasingly significant part of the history of economics has modeled itself after the methodologies developed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars.
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Article
How God, Adam Smith, and the invisible hand changes over time
Jan 5, 2012
So with a suitably provocative title I think we can declare 2012 open.
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Article
How God, Adam Smith, and the invisible hand changes over time
Jan 5, 2012
So with a suitably provocative title I think we can declare 2012 open.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012English Agricultural Markets and the State: The Corn Returns, 1685-1864
This research project offers a radical reconsideration of the centrality of the Corn Returns to the development of classical liberal political economy and shows how much the Corn Laws enriched agrarian interests and how their repeal represented a boost to British manufacturing.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012Protocols of War and the Driving Force of Modeling Strategy
This research project examines how US military needs during World War II and the Cold War steered engineers and applied mathematicians to an economic way of thinking about scarce resources, including limited computational resources, and how economists subsequently incorporated that into mathematics.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012Emergency Preservation of Federal Bankruptcy Court Records, 1940-2000
This research project documents long-run trends in personal bankruptcy, with special emphasis on the use of the bankruptcy law at the local level and among women.
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Article
At Home in Economics
Nov 29, 2011
My friend read somewhere that the experience of death makes people think in philosophical terms. He might have thought of religion rather than philosophy, I replied. We agreed, and wandered off talking about our crypto-religious experiences in good old secular Europe.
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Article
Student discontent, teaching economics, and Robin Wells's suggestions for shifting our perspective: A historical case
Nov 20, 2011
On November 2nd, I was sitting in the Hayden Library Special Collection reading room at MIT, browsing archives on the undergraduate and graduate students’ discontent during the early 70s and the response of the economics department faculty.
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Article
Does econ blogging open new conversations (part II): lessons from Mike Konczal, Noah Smith, Mark Thoma and Milton Friedman
Nov 15, 2011
The INET roundtable on “new conversations and the academy” took place a week ago. Most panelists were bloggers, including Mike Konczal from RortyBomb and Noah Smith from Noahopinion.
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Article
These dangerous postmodern relativists, Part I: Merchants of doubt
Nov 14, 2011
A recent e-mail conversation I had with Harro Maas concerning one of my latest drafts (shameless self-promotion) made me buy and read Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s, Merchants of Doubts.
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Article
Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman: How can history stimulate new economic thinking?
Nov 11, 2011
The following text was sent to us by Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman, we reproduce it in its entirety.
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Article
Backhouse and Bateman want Worldly Philosophers, not only dentists; not everyone agrees
Nov 9, 2011
Professors Roger Backhouse and Brad Bateman wrote an op-ed for the New York Times a few days ago, arguing that “thanks to decades of academic training in the “dentistry” approach to economics, today’s Keynes or Friedman is nowhere to be found” - we have stopped thinking big they say.
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Article
Does Economics blogging open new conversations ? (Part I)
Nov 3, 2011
This is the question I’m supposed to answer for an experimental INET conference aimed at inspiring new thinking through interdisciplinary conversation and collective reflection without rules.
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Article
What's in a name?
Nov 2, 2011
In the case of utility, it’s all in the name.
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Article
Nobel Prize Tasseology
Oct 25, 2011
Till is right. It’s not the historian’s task to question the legitimacy of the decisions of the Nobel Committee.
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Article
“Cause and Effect in the Macroeconomy”
Oct 19, 2011
It’s Nobel Prize time again. And what a beautiful prize this year it is!
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Article
Bretton Woods, Past and Present: 4. The Teaching of Economics
Oct 1, 2011
This one is different. Tiago, Benjamin and Floris have asked a dozen economists in the Bretton Woods hotel hall to reflect on the way their teaching has been affected by the current economic crisis and their answers, taken collectively, are quite puzzling.
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Article
Bretton Woods, Past and Present: 3. Models in Economics
Sep 24, 2011
I cannot resist but to start quoting Mary Morgan’s second entry to the second edition of the New Palgrave: “Modeling became the dominant methodology of economics during the 20th century.”