Technology & Innovation
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Narrative as Destiny: Steering Markets and Innovation to Serve Society
Dec 6, 2017
“The stories we tell ourselves about the world are a map of the world as we see it. And if we want to change the world, we have to change the story first.”
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The Unfolding Energy Revolution: Lessons from Europe and the United Kingdom
Nov 30, 2017 | 04:00—05:30
A discussion with Michael Grubb, INET Grantee and Professor of Energy and Climate Change at University College of London.
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China’s International Economic Strategy
Nov 21, 2017 | 04:00—05:30
The Implications of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative for China and the World Economy
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What's the Future?
Oct 23, 2017 | 08:30
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Conference paper
Innovative Enterprise and Sustainable Prosperity
Oct 2017
We want an economy that generates stable and equitable growth—or what I call “sustainable prosperity.” We want productivity growth that makes it possible for the population to have higher living standards over time. We want an equitable sharing of the gains from productivity growth among those whose work efforts and financial resources contribute to that growth. And we want sufficient job stability to enable workers to remain in productive employment for some four decades at work while providing them with enough savings to provide them with adequate incomes over some two decades of retirement.
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Conference paper
Wealth Creation and the Entrepreneurial State
Oct 2017
Building symbiotic public-private partnerships
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Taking the Con Out of Economics? The Limits of Negative Darwinism
Oct 22, 2017 | 12:00
What Do Citations Actually Measure in Economics and How Should Economic Journals and Department Review Committees Use This Data?
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Nobel Laureates to Co-Chair Independent Commission on Global Economy
Oct 22, 2017
Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Spence and a global team of leading thinkers are calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy
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Conference paper
The Vanishing Middle Class: The Growth of a Dual Economy
Oct 2017
Growing income inequality is threatening the American middle class, and the middle class is vanishing before our eyes. We are still one country, but the stretch of incomes is fraying the unity of our nation.
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Conference paper
The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism
Oct 2017
The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism Guy Standing We are in the midst of a Global Transformation, analogous to Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation described in his seminal 1944 book. Whereas Polanyi’s Transformation was about constructing national market systems, today’s is about the painful construction of a global market system. To use Polanyi’s term, the ‘dis-embedded’ phase has been dominated by an ideology of market liberalisation, commodification and privatisation, orchestrated by financial interests, as in his model. The similarities also extend to today’s fundamental challenge, how to construct a ‘re-embedded’ phase, with new systems of regulation, distribution and social protection.
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The Growth of a Dual Economy
Oct 21, 2017 | 05:00
“Dual Economy” models were developed to explain growth in the developing world. Now they appear necessary to comprehend the high income trap that afflicts the world’s most developed economies.
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Reawakening
PlenaryFrom the Origins of Economic Ideas to the Challenges of Our Time
Oct 21–23, 2017
INET gathered hundreds of new economic thinkers in Edinburgh to discuss the past, present, and future of the economics profession.
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Festival for New Economic Thinking
YSI
ConferenceOct 19–20, 2017
The Festival for New Economic Thinking is a collaborative initiative of several organizations, and aims to bring together those who seek to improve how economics is taught, studied and practiced.
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How Economists Turned Corporations into Predators
Oct 5, 2017
The Idea That Businesses Exist Solely to Enrich Shareholders Is Harmful Nonsense
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Working paper
Innovative Enterprise Solves the Agency Problem
Oct 2017
The Theory of the Firm, Financial Flows, and Economic Performance
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American Big Tech vs. China Big Tech: Common Challenges or Conflicting Concerns?
Sep 26, 2017 | 08:15—09:45
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Innovation, Institutions and Governance
YSI
ConferenceSep 16–19, 2017
The YSI Economics of Innovation Working Group in partnership with the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology is hosting a YSI Conference on “Innovation, Institutions and Governance”.
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How About that Looming Robotic Job Apocalypse?
Aug 16, 2017
Why we should worry about job quality, not quantity—or robot overlords
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How “Shareholder Value” is Killing Innovation
Jul 31, 2017
The prevailing stock market ideology enriches value extractors, not value creators
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YSI Workshop @ 2017 ECLAC Summer School on Latin American Economies
YSI
WorkshopJul 24–26, 2017
The YSI Latin America Working Group is hosting a workshop at the United Nations ECLAC Summer School on Latin American economies.
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Working Paper Series
US Pharma’s Financialized Business Model
Jul 2017
Price gouging in the US pharmaceutical drug industry goes back more than three decades.
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Globalization and the Developing World
YSI Latin America Convening 2017
YSI
ConferenceJun 17–21, 2017
The Young Scholars Initiative is hosting its regional convening for Latin America in Mexico City from 17-21 June.
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Working Paper Series
The Functions of the Stock Market and the Fallacies of Shareholder Value
Jun 2017
Conventional wisdom has it that the primary function of the stock market is to raise cash for companies for the purpose of investing in productive capabilities. The conventional wisdom is wrong.
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Trento Festival of Economics
YSI Europe Convening 2017
YSI
WorkshopJun 1–4, 2017
The Young Scholars Initiative and its working groups will be hosting meetings and discussions in and around the 2017 Trento Festival of Economics.
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It’s Not Just Profit Wrecking American Healthcare
May 15, 2017
A look at America’s strange and dangerous approach to medicine, and how to fix it
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The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class
Apr 19, 2017
How rationalization, marketization, and globalization characterize the U.S. economy during the past 50 years, and how the behavior of companies and fate of American workers have changed during this process.
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Making Innovation Work for China and other Developing Countries
Apr 12, 2017
Along the entire “innovation chain” — from research and development, to production and commercialization — government and private sectors have very different roles to play.
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Questions to Consider on Robots and Jobs
Apr 6, 2017
Despite dismissive comments by the U.S. Treasury Secretary, facing the challenge posed by robotics replacing human labor raises key public policy questions
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Which Productivity Puzzle?
Apr 3, 2017
The decline in productivity growth has a longer history
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How & Why Government, Universities, & Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists & High-Tech Workers
Mar 28, 2017
Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies.
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Working paper
How & Why Government, Universities, & Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists & High-Tech Workers
Mar 2017
Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies. That is not to say that they don’t exist. They are created when employers or government agencies tamper with the natural functioning of the wage mechanism.
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The Debate Over Taxing Robots in Context
Mar 24, 2017
Taxing the use of robotics may or may not be the answer, but the question remains how to compensate for the growing inequality created by our changing economies
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Can “It” Happen Again? Defining the Battlefield for a Theoretical Revolution in Economics
Feb 27, 2017
As part of our “Experts on Trial Series”, Antonella Palumbo argues for stripping away ‘scientific’ shibboleths that mask social and political choices
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INET Guide to the 2017 EEA Meeting
ConferenceFeb 23–26, 2017
A reference guide to all Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) community presentations at the Eastern Economic Association’s (EEA) 2017 annual meeting
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Carbon Dividends: The Bipartisan Key to Climate Policy?
Feb 13, 2017
The practical question in Washington today is not whether regulations will go, but whether anything will replace them
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Jayadev: TPP is Dead, but its Legacy Lives On
Feb 10, 2017
Institute scholar Arjun Jayadev argues that while TPP is dead, its damaging legacy on intellectual property rights is likely to shape future bilateral trade agreements
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The Economics of Post-Factual Democracy
Debating bubbles and the implication of the post-truth phenomena and expertise on modern democracies
YSI
WorkshopFeb 9–10, 2017
Young Scholars from the YSI working groups on Innovation, Complexity Economics, Philosophy of Economics and Financial Stability will present their research at a one-day workshop following The Economics of Post-Factual Democracy conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Is Inequality a Political Choice?
Feb 3, 2017
Research by INET-affiliated scholars shows the US lags far behind its peers on inclusive growth, suggesting inequality is not an inevitable consequence of globalization and technology
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Robots, Universal Basic Income, and the Welfare State
Jan 5, 2017
Evidence thus far questions the assumption that robotics are eliminating jobs. INET Senior Vice President for Programs Rick McGahey says the UBI debate should focus on the long-term weakening of labor’s bargaining power
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INET Research in a Year of Living Dangerously
Dec 29, 2016
Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric
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The Trump Agenda and the Economic and Investment Outlook for 2017
Dec 13, 2016 | 04:00—05:30
A discussion on President-elect Trump’s economic agenda and its implications for the U.S. and world economies.
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Capitalism in the Time of Trump?
Dec 8, 2016
As the world turns upside down, Mariana Mazzucato discusses how to shape an economy that works for everyone
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Working Paper Series
The Value-Extracting CEO: How Executive Stock-Based Pay Undermines Investment in Productive Capabilities
Dec 2016
The business corporation is the central economic institution in a modern economy. A company’s senior executives, with the advice and support of the board of directors, are responsible for the allocation of corporate resources to investments in productive capabilities. Senior executives also advise the board on the extent to which, given the need to invest in productive capabilities, the company can afford to make cash distributions to shareholders. Motivating corporate resource-allocation decisions are the modes of remuneration that incentivize and reward the top executives of these companies. A sound analysis of the operation and performance of a modern economy requires an understanding of not only how much these executives are paid but also the ways in which the prevailing system of executive pay influences their decisions to allocate corporate resources.
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The Retreat from Hyper-Globalization
Dec 1, 2016
Flows of goods and services, people and capital have overwhelmed the ability of political processes to accommodate them
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Why Economic Recovery Requires Rethinking Capitalism
Nov 15, 2016
Mission-oriented public investment is vital to spur a revival of private-sector investment
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Lazonick links stock buybacks to America’s jobs challenge
Nov 4, 2016
In an Al Jazeera documentary “In Search of the Great American Job”, Institute scholar William Lazonick offers some arch insights into the relationship between financialization — particularly the “shareholder value” ideology in corporations, which drives the transfer of profits to shareholders through stock buybacks — and job creation and inequality.
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The World Economy’s Growing Debt Burden
Nov 2, 2016 | 04:00—05:30
A conversation with Richard Vague, Managing Partner at Gabriel Investments and Chairman of the Governor’s Woods Foundation.
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Inequality As Policy: Selective Trade Protectionism Favors Higher Earners
Oct 27, 2016
Offshoring manufacturing may have hurt many working people in America, but professionals and intellectual property have been robustly protected
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Piecing Together a Paradigm
YSI Plenary
YSI
ConferenceOct 19–22, 2016
New approaches are being developed, but efforts are fragmented and need to be brought together if we hope to piece together a paradigm.
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VP Biden Cites Lazonick in Critique of Stock Buybacks
Sep 28, 2016
Vice President warns that corporate stock buybacks restrict America’s long-term prosperity, citing the research of Institute grantee William Lazonick who has long argued the same
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Understanding the Economics of Networks
Sep 7, 2016
Prof. Sanjeev Goyal explains his general theory of network formation based on individual incentives, and their economic implications
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The Pros and Cons of a Universal Basic Income
Aug 29, 2016
In June of this year, Swiss voters saw an initiative on their ballots calling for an “unconditional basic income” that would “allow the whole population to lead a decent life and participate in public life.” Put on the ballot by a petition drive after it was rejected in parliament, the initiative was rejected by 77 percent of Swiss voters, with 23 percent approving.
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Working Paper Series
The Mismeasure of Mammon: Uses and Abuses of Executive Pay Data
Aug 2016
Report to the Institute for New Economic Thinking on the statistical measurement and policy implications of the compensation of the highest- paid U.S. corporate executives
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Is Technology Killing Capitalism?
Aug 17, 2016
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”?
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Modern Monopolies
Jul 21, 2016
With the power of modern computing being harnessed into increasingly small and portable devices, what do digital platforms mean for the entrenched global economy?
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There Is a Way to Stop Machines From Making Americans Poorer
Jun 8, 2016
Technology will ruin America if we don’t compensate for its impact, warns Andy Stern.
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Should we really be 'learning to love' the robots?
Jun 7, 2016
A response to Arjun Jayadev’s argument about the impact of automation on our work and life
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How to relax and start loving the robots
Jun 3, 2016
Anxiety over human labor being replaced by cyborgs may be in vogue, but it’s overblown — machines may help us achieve healthier and more meaningful lives
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Capitalism and the media: Can crowdfunding spare us from bad news?
May 18, 2016
Julia Cage warns that a media ravaged by market forces cannot serve democracy’s need for an informed citizenry.
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Future of Work Industry 4.0 and the Pursuit of Social Innovation
ConferenceMay 4, 2016
Does the technology revolution require a new social policy?
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Twitter and the Stock News Echo Chamber that Whips up Volatility
Apr 17, 2016
Anyone watching the stock market has seen this: a post hits Twitter containing old news, and investors react as if it were new.
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We Stopped Pfizer’s Tax Dodge, Now Let’s End the Buybacks
Apr 8, 2016
Industrial journalist Ken Jacobson and economist William Lazonick (both of the Academic-Industry Research Network), call for an end to stock market manipulation through buybacks.
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Innovation and the State
Jan 26, 2016
Economic growth and rising prosperity does not happen at the moment of invention. Only an innovation policy aiming to maximise activities throughout the innovation cycle will succeed in capturing economic growth that enhance the welfare of all citizens.
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Start-Up Governments, or Can Bureaucracies Innovate?
Jan 4, 2016
For most economists and indeed for social scientists in general such a question induces shudders as already asking this seems wrong – aren’t governments more prone to failures than markets, and aren’t governments supposed to provide basic and stable institutions for markets to function?
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The Institute at ASSA
DiscussionJan 2, 2016
Join us for a reception at the ASSA conference in San Francisco
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U.S. Corporations Don’t Need Tax Breaks on Foreign Profits
Dec 21, 2015
Many Americans have expressed outrage over Pfizer’s plan, through its merger with Allergan, to move its tax home from the United States to Ireland. Now, in a New York Times op-ed, Carl Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider turned hedge fund activist, has joined the chorus. He labels the Pfizer-Allergan deal a “travesty,” blaming the U.S.’s “uncompetitive international tax system.”
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Invention vs Innovation
Dec 8, 2015
Innovation is not a magic pill to solve the current afflictions that ail our 21st century economy.
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Global Tax Dodging Just One Part of Pfizer’s Corrupt Business Model
Dec 3, 2015
Why are we paying for corporate behavior that crushes innovation, cheats taxpayers, cost jobs, and heightens inequality?
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Externalities and Public Goods: Theory OR Society?
Nov 19, 2015
How much does the standard theory of externalities and public goods really say?
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Economic Growth, Climate Change and Environmental Limits
Nov 6, 2015
Will environmental limits, including limits on the climate system, slow or even halt economic growth? If not, how will the nature of economic growth have to shift?
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Working Paper Series
Innovative Enterprise or Sweatshop Economics? In Search of Foundations of Economic Analysis
Oct 2015
By integrating the history of industrial development in Britain and the United States with the ideas of leading economic thinkers, this essay demonstrates the absurdity of perfect competition as the ideal of economic efficiency.
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What the Steve Jobs Movie Won’t Tell You About Apple’s Success
Oct 23, 2015
Public funding behind the technology is the secret ingredient.
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What Really Caused the Crisis & What to Do About It
Oct 14, 2015
Adair Turner discusses his new book, Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance.
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Big Finance, Demystified
Oct 8, 2015
John Kay shares findings from his new book, Other People’s Money, and his insights on changing the financial sector.
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Latest Institute Grants Announced
Jul 17, 2015
The Institute for New Economic Thinking has awarded $2 million in grants to fund 21 different projects as part of the latest round of its research grant program.
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It's Time to Get Radical on Inequality
Jun 25, 2015
America’s economic system has failed by not raising living standards for most.
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How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finances, Freedom, and Security
Jun 14, 2015
Janine Wedel charts the fast–evolving system of power and influence. Who is accountable? What are the remedies available to the average citizen?
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America’s Competition Fetish Kills Creativity and Produces Human Sheep
May 28, 2015
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Working paper
Contagion Exposure and Protection Technology
May 2015
People adopt diverse measures to protect from contagion. I propose a taxonomy of protection technologies, and present a model to study the implications of the technology on the prevalence of infections and on welfare at different levels of exposure.
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Working paper
Input Diffusion and the Evolution of Production Network
Apr 2015
The adoption and diffusion of inputs in the production network is at the heart of technological progress. What determines which inputs are initially considered and eventually adopted by innovators? We examine the evolution of input linkages from a network perspective, starting from a stylized model of network formation.
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Upholding the Rule of Law
Apr 13, 2015
Here we are, some 7 years after the Great Financial Crisis, and not one senior banking executive has gone to jail.
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Conference paper
Austeritarianism in Europe: What Options for Resistance?
Apr 2015
In much of Europe, the social rights and social protections won in the first post-war decades, by labour movements in particular, have subsequently been seriously eroded, and are further threatened by neoliberal austerity.
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Conference paper
Reflexivity, expectations feedback and almost self-fulfilling equilibria: economic theory, empirical evidence and laboratory experiments
Apr 2015
We discuss recent work on bounded rationality and learning in relation to Soros’ principle of reflexivity and stress the empirical importance of non-rational, almost self-fulfilling equilibria in positive feedback systems.
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Conference paper
How Money Drives US Congressional Elections: More Evidence
Apr 2015
“Because many interests come into play in the financing of an election campaign and then they ask you to pay back. So the election campaign should be independent from anyone who may finance it.” - Pope Francis
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Conference paper
The Prince('s) Rules: Economic Theories and Political Struggle in Europe.
Apr 2015
The Cyclically Adjusted Budget (CAB) is the estimated size of the public budget at some previously defined level of output which may represent the ‘normal’ output or a policy target and that usually is considered to be unaffected by business fluctuations or cycles. Such an estimate is supposed to isolate the automatic movements of revenues and expenditures, given the current structure of tax and transfers, from discretionary fiscal interventions and indicate the “impact” and sustainability of fiscal action.
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Conference paper
Social investment for inclusive growth: a Southern European perspective
Apr 2015
Inequality has emerged as a major economic issue: sharp increases in the share of income going to those at the very top of the income distribution, a rising share of income going to profits, stagnant real wages, and a fall in median family income have raised concern over the sustainability of our economies and societies.
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Conference paper
Goethe’s Faust and the socioeconomic roots of modern subjectivity
Apr 2015
The modern individual is the point of intersection of the processes of consumption and production. The subjective representation of these processes has been determined by two branches of the modern middle class, the bourgeoisie, which has privileged consumption, and the bureaucracy, which has privileged production.
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Political Institutions & Inequality
Apr 9, 2015 | 11:00—12:30
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Conference paper
How the Planned Perversion of Democracy generated accelerating inequalities
Apr 2015
What is at stake : Increasing doubt over the virtue of democracy. One cannot doubt the ubiquitous lack of confidence and hope in the so-called democratic institutions by a large majority of the people. The fundamental cause is the blatant contradiction between the principle of democracy, promoting the rule and thereby the welfare of the people, and the indomitable tendency of rising and unsustainable inequality in terms of income, standard of living and wealth.
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Occupy? Strike? Separatism? Populism? Are Any Of The Historical Forms Of Protest Effective In The Information Age?
Apr 9, 2015 | 07:15—08:45
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Financial Networks, Financial Innovation & Inequality
Apr 9, 2015 | 10:30—12:00
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Conference paper
Perverse and virtuous feedbacks between inequality and innovation: Which role for public institutions and public investment?
Apr 2015
In this paper, we deal with the complex relationship connecting inequality to innovation, and the ways through which public investment, in particular public participation to R&D initiatives, may affect it. We first stress that multiple different equilibria may exist in the inequality-innovation space.
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Stimulating Innovation & Growth
Apr 9, 2015 | 06:45—08:15
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Inequality, Innovation, and Public Investment
Apr 9, 2015 | 06:15—07:45
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Conference paper
The New York Times and American Tax Policy: Representing Citizens or Echoing Elites?
Apr 2015
A recent New York Times article observed that Americans want action to address inequality. 2016 presidential candidates from both parties also acknowledge that inequality is a pressing concern. But not one of the candidates has proposed to do anything meaningful about it, sharing wealthy Americans’ (understandable) opposition to any solution (Scheiber 2015). Perhaps nothing has been done because there is nothing to do about it.
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Conference paper
Leveraging the network: a stress-test framework based on DebtRank
Apr 2015
We develop a novel stress-test framework to monitor systemic risk in financial systems. The modular structure of the framework allows to accommodate for a variety of shock scenarios, methods to estimate interbank exposures and mechanisms of distress propagation.
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Liberté, Égalité, Fragilité
PlenaryApr 8–11, 2015
The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its sixth Annual Conference from April 8 to April 11, 2015, in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
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Conference paper
Precarious Condition: A Challenge For New Forms Of Struggle
Feb 2015
This text is part of a research project still in working progress that collects different contributions by the author and rewrite and reanalyse some reflections, already present, in a different form, in some publications:
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Working paper
The Labor Market Consequences of Electricity Adoption: Concrete Evidence from the Great Depression
Feb 2015
When the adoption of a new labor‐saving technology increases labor productivity, it is an open question whether the economy adjusts in the medium‐term by decreasing employment or increasing output. This paper studies the effects of cheaper electricity on the labor market during the Great Depression.
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Working paper
Contagion Risk and Network Design
Feb 2015
Individuals derive benefits from their connections, but these may, at the same time, transmit external threats. Individuals therefore invest in security to protect themselves. However, the incentives to invest in security depend on their network exposures. We study the problem of designing a network that provides the right individual incentives.