benjaminkahn's blog

The INET conference in Hong Kong is serious business. Students will be wearing suits for the first time since their cousin's wedding only to bump into senior public servants with buffed cuff-links who in turn are mingling with billionaires and Nobel Prize winners. It's seriously adult stuff.

It's just a shame that I will probably be too giddy to notice. In fairness I will try not to gush at people; like I may have done with Axel Leijonhufvud last year, or Richard Koo, or Robert Skidelsky, or... well... that's not really the point. Read more

I  thought I was on to an inside reference when re-reading the General Theory when Keynes calls Marx, Edgeworth and others simply by name, but refers to "Professor Pigou" in several instances.  What devilish bit of British humour was I missing out on, had Pigou slighted Keynes in some talk and therefore the emphasis on his position as professor as Keynes disagree with him?   Read more

Mid August, with the Olympics over, Paralympics and Premiership starting (that's Soccer for the American readership), it is well and truly the quiet period for most of academia.

But now is also the time for conference announcements (for the next season) and I just discovered that the History of Economics Society will have four sessions at the 2013 year's ASSA, featuring fellow bloggers Tiago and Yann.  Read more

I always think of Adam Smith when I hear the term 'division of labour' - but I'm being cured of this by reading a bit more about Britains late 18th century in Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men. A very good read on industrialists and doctors, it remarks on Matthew Boulton's (think steam engine / manufacturing) explanation to Lord Warwick (in 1773) that it is ithe seperation of processes which allow British manufacturers to compete with continental Europe. So Adam Smith's comments were not so much brilliant discovery, but rather explanation of well established fact: Read more

Like many economists, I have enjoyed Axel Leijonhufvud’s “Life among the Econ” and nodded appreciatively when he described the social classifications of the Econ as “Grads, Adults and Elders” and chuckled when the young grad tries to impress the elders of the ‘dept’ through adept ‘modl’ building; so when the man himself was holding a glass of champagne and chatting with me at the INET conference, I had to ask how he got that paper started. Read more

I think I am on the track of what 'New Economics' is, and one could roughly sum up two days of presentations in two diagrams:

 vs.  Read more

Lunch was just interrupted Bill Janeway standing up to announce that this morning he decided to give $25m to INET and the board will fund-raise this up to $100m over ten years, but then George Soros added $50m in unconditional funding for INET... Not sure what more to say. Two days of talks about how Austerity doesn't work, and then this. INET staff, if you're reading, consider this the first grant application: The future of New Economic Thinking in Historical Perspective! Oh yeah, of course they finished by playing "the best things in life are free" and are now introducing Amartya Sen. Unreal.

just as the agricultural share of employment has fallen from 40% in the 1920s to less than 2% of the workforce in Europe today, manufacturing's share of employment will fall to less than 5% of employment. That is not jyst for Europe, according to Adair Turner's excellent dinner speech, but that is across the world. He has pointed out that it is not an issue of international transfer of jobs (although it dominates headlines) but it is because of innovation which makes the productivity of (manufacturing) labour increasinglty higher. As that happens, less and less labour input will be needed to prodcue the tangile products we need - hey, even China's manufacturing workforce has been falling for a decade - and the logical conclusion of such a tendency is that we won't need as much labour. Read more

Dinner has already rolled around on what has been a quick day. We have managed to corner Steve Keen and Dirk Bezemer for a round of questions and have confirmed Axel Leijonhufvud and Nicola Giocoli for tomorrow (in fact I am borrowing Nicola's iPad for this post as my laptop seems to have given up). That all said we are asking people four key questions and then building around that depending on answers and who people are.  Read more

Just wanted to let you all know that amongst the distinguished, distinguishable and disturbing people at the INET conference we have inserted ourselves in the middle to do some interviews, attend talks and blog about what is going on. So far, I've managed to have a Curry-wurst, get a room and see George Soros invest twenty five million dollars in a new research collaboration, and just about getting ready to go and be part of the Young Scholar Initiative's 'Commons' event, which is running as part of the conference. Read more