Mention the government and the market and all academic reflection and civilized discussion dissolves into heated monologues. Politicians are an extreme case.
Why so? Why for instance is it always the government versus the market, instead of, say, which form of organization to choose among government, market, culture and corporation? One reason must be Karl Marx, who reified the conceptual distinction between the production forces labor and capital into a fundamental struggle for power between the class of the laborers and the class of capitalists. A second obvious and related reason must be the deeply ideological Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union of the 1950s-1980s. In any case, it is unfortunate, as an understanding of the relationship between the government and the market is central to economics. How are the government and the market connected? Without any claim as to what is desirable or not, I think it is useful to distinguish between three kinds of connections. Read more
You would have thought that to be a "jazz economist" was a good thing. I first imagined a "cool cat" that would entrance the hearts and minds of the populace. Not so.
This time there were new elements in the way the meeting was organized: there were more plenary sessions, several of them with non-historians of economics (
