Finance

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.

India has for the last twenty years been undergoing a rapid and abiding structural shift in its pattern of development. The transformation of the economy from the period of the license raj to the post liberalization era has wrought many changes, with somewhat ambiguous implications.

The president of INET, Johnson(2013) emphasized the importance of Asian tradition for building up the New Economic Thinking. “It ismy sense that the Asian tradition of thought and philosophical perspective are better suited to embracing this radical uncertainty and living in the experimentation of the adaptive complex system that our world appears to resemble than are the Western mindsets that are the product of the Cartesian Enlightenment.” In the summary he argues that “As the Asian societies continue to evolve the architects will be better served by an new economics for Asia and from Asia that is based on the notions of radical uncertainty, complex adaptive systems, mimetic desire, the inseparability of politics and economics, and a vision of a world where policy makers are themselves less knowing and less capable of control than we often yearn to believe is within their power.”

Debate about the pension crises has centered on certain questions such as: Are greedy government workers bankrupting states? Arepension-slashing politicians backed by big money saving the day? Or do the budget problems of state and localgovernments have more to do with wasteful corporate subsidies than pensions? What are the real policy solutions to the pressures placed on pensions?”

Economists discussing the problem of radical uncertainty commonly invoke Frank Knight’s classic definition in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, but only rarely venture to explore the broader contours of his argument.