History

Historians Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University) and Erik Conway (Caltech) talk to Rob about their just released book, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.

Perry Mehrling’s new book traces the rise of the dollar through the life and career of influential economist Charles Kindleberger

How a bleak Christian theology influenced the development of the dismal science

Why does the apparently prescient and correct “key currency” view remain an embattled minority view?

Things are going to break and central banks are going to have to respond, but the mental frame that most people will be using is not well suited for understanding how the world now works

This research project explores the factors producing “herding” in the economics profession and professional investment community with the goal of articulating policy changes appropriate to the organization of the economics profession and its practices in particular.

This research project recounts the intellectual history of the dollar as an international reserve currency, starting with World War I, which brought the international gold standard to an end, and continuing all the way up to the present global financial crisis.

This research project provides us with a greater understanding of why the Coase theorem came to captivate the minds of economics and legal scholars and how its impact on economics and law reshaped both the theoretical landscape and legal-economic policymaking.

This research project demonstrates the ways in which fact and value are entangled in economic concepts and the implications of this entanglement for the ways in which various economic problems are approached.

Pari passu clauses were deliberately crafted to gain an upper hand in sovereign bankruptcy disputes brought to the London stock exchange’s jurisdiction

Pari passu clauses were deliberately crafted to gain an upper hand in sovereign bankruptcy disputes brought to the London stock exchange’s jurisdiction

James M. Buchanan’s defenders argue he was not racist because of his ties with the anti-apartheid economist W.H. Hutt, but this defense fails miserably

Despite his opposition to South Africa’s apartheid, Hutt embraced notions of black inferiority

A new global economic system has to be based on a key principle of Bretton Woods: multilateralism

Evidence reveals our remote ancestors were neither brutes nor innocents, but complex beings whose experiments in living have much to teach us. Welcome news as disaster looms in every direction.