Economics Profession

Good incentives are no substitute for good citizens.

Economists have gone to great lengths to write humans out of economics, pushing self-interest and generally providing two choices—faith in markets or the state.

Economists make what we do seem complicated, says Ha-Joon Chang. It’s not.

To get beyond the neoclassical fallacy, economists have to stop relying on constrained-optimization methodology

The Chicago School has long used bankrupt assumptions to strangle antitrust policy.

In this paper we comparatively explore three claims concerning the disciplinary character of economics by means of citation analysis.

At the heart of economics is a theory of action. It reflects views about how human beings make economic decisions and leads to an analysis of aggregate consequences.

Neoclassical economics has abolished the role of psychology in decision making by assuming that all individuals are rational optimizers with rational expectations about future events.

The purpose of the paper is to argue for attention to be paid, not only to choice of theory, but also to choice of theoretical approach, in order to address issues posed by the crisis.

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.

The financial crisis of 2008, and the subsequent worldwide economic depression and continuing dislocation, have made little to no impression on the way macroeconomics is taught at the university level, from Economics 101 through graduate school. It has been “business as usual’, which (it seems to me) means an almost studious avoidance of any attempt to acquire knowledge of how monetary economies actually work.

When the Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics (CORE) project launched on 11 November 2013 at Her Majesty’s Treasury in London, we promised that we would be ‘teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened’. The last six months have shown us that this is challenging but we are well on our way to doing it.

Economics has advanced an enormous distance from the Walrasian paradigm and the Neoclassical synthesis. However, undergraduate curriculums continue to heavily favour these views of what economics is and what tools it provides for understanding contemporarypublic problems.

In the past three years, students around the world have turned the heat of scrutiny onto our economics departments. Our call is strikingly uniform across our diverse cultures and languages: we want critical debate back in the economics curriculum.

I first came across economics students’ campaigns to revolutionise their education in that bastion of radical thought: the newsroom of the Financial Times.