Education

Students in Europe have created an important resource for those seeking alternative curricular materials

Joe Earle, co-founder of The Post-Crash Economics Society, member of Rethinking Economics and co-author of the Econocracy, explains why his group is trying to democratize economics as a conversation and a policy–making process.

Is Market Capitalism simply an accident of certain factors that came together in the 19th and 20th centuries? Does the innovation of economics require a new economics of innovation? Is the study of economics deeply affected by the incentive structures faced by economists themselves, necessitating a study of the “economics of economics”?

There is a mix of common-sense opinions, political prejudices, conventional business practice, and pragmatic rules of thumb, supported in an ad hoc, opportunistic way by bits and pieces of economic theory.

On George Akerlof’s “The Market for Lemons”

Business school students are taught to extract resources instead of creating value.

New economic thinking has the potential to make political debates far more productive

What we’re reading: A weekly scan of published items relevant to the Institute’s work

A major shift is needed in the Econometrics curriculum for both graduate and undergraduate teaching to include modern topics.

Orthodox macroeconomics has become a place where visions die and hopes are banished, for both liberals and conservatives.

Join us for a reception at the ASSA conference in San Francisco

How much does the standard theory of externalities and public goods really say?

I describe the American economy in the twenty-first century as a dual economy in the spirit of W. Arthur Lewis.

This essay critically evaluates the benefits and costs of the dominant methodology in macroeconomics, the DSGE approach. Although the approach has led to great progress in some areas, it has also created biases and blind spots in the profession that hold back our understanding and our ability to govern the macroeconomy. There is great scope for progress in macroeconomics by judiciously pushing the boundaries of some of the methodological restrictions imposed by the DSGE approach.

Marc Lavoie discusses the methodological foundations of heterodox economics, and offers a very different model of money and credit, firms and pricing, consumer theory, effective demand and employment and growth theories.