Economics Profession

Changing of the Guard?: Opening Remarks at INET Hong Kong

Opening remarks at the Institute for New Economic Thinking's "Changing of the Guard?" conference in Hong Kong on April 4, 2013, by INET Executive Director Rob Johnson, Fung Global Institute Founding Chairman Victor K. Fung, CIGI President Rohinton Medhora, and INET Governing Board Chair Anatole Kaletsky. Read more

Kuhn vs Lakatos: it is not the institute of anything goes...

by Local Historian on April 04, 2013

In his opening remarks, Robert Johnson said that this "is not the institute of anything goes" with INET now getting to a point where it needs to stop criticising the mainstream and should instead "create a new vision."

Outside the main hall of the conference there is even a poster setting out the core institutions needed to affect change in economics. That poster, and indeed the 'old' approach of INET is very Lakatos. Accept the core and work to modify the periphery.

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Cognitive Foundations of Economic Microfoundations

Project Leader:

Paul Schrater

Project Members:

Nisheeth Srivastava

Economists have historically assumed that economic agents have direct perceptual access to the utility of goods and to probabilities in the world. Convergent streams of evidence from behavioral economics and neuroscience suggest such assumptions are incorrect: preference and probability are both learned from experience. This project will formulate a normative theory of learning both preferences and probabilities that explains a broad spectrum of economic behavior heretofore judged irrational. By retaining normativity, this theory remains amenable to standard economic analyses. If successful, this project will lead to an enriched representation of agency for primitive units of economic behavior in both micro- and macroeconomics.

Paul Samuelson and the History of Economics

by Pedro G Duarte on January 22, 2013 6 comments

Paul Samuelson is well-known to have been a compulsive citer and for having a particular Whig program for the history of economics. Until late in his career he kept writing on "old economists" like Cassel, Böhm-Bawerk, and Ricardo, for example (for instance, see his co-authored article on Ricardo published in HOPE in 2006) . Read more

ASSA Meetings: a Showcase for the History of Economics?

by Pedro G Duarte on January 20, 2013 1 comment

Economists and historians of economics have related differently over time, and the past of the discipline has then served for varied purposes. The matter compounds when we take into account that it has been and it currently is the case that most historians of economics are in economics departments. Besides sharing the same institutional space, they also share one important event: the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA). Read more

Jurassic Economics at ASSA-AEA 2013

by Pedro G Duarte on January 10, 2013

The History of Economics Society (HES) held four sessions at the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) 2013 meeting, in San Diego, Jan. 4-6: “Keynes and the International Monetary System” (co-organized by Robert Dimand and Rebeca Gomez Betancourt), “Writing MIT’s History” (organized by E. Roy Weintraub and having our blog fellow Yann Giraud presenting), “Looking for Best Practices in Economic Journalism: Past and Present” (organized by our blog fellow Tiago Mata), and “Real Business Cycle after Three Decades: Past, Present and Future” (a panel discussion co-organized by Warren L. Young and Sumru Altug).

I will here focus only on the latter. Participants included Nobel Prize Laureates and central figures of the Real Business Cycle (RBC) macroeconomics Read more

Big business has corrupted economics

by The Institute for... on November 27, 2012 2 comments

Big business has corrupted economics - Guardian UK

You know the country is in a financial mess when even establishment figures such as Rachel Lomax are calling for revolutionary thinking

by Aditya Chakrabortty Read more

What About the Questions That Economics Can’t Answer?

by The Institute for... on September 25, 2012 17 comments

This is the first in a series of articles that INET's Rob Johnson will be writing for Yahoo! Finance. You can read the original text on Yahoo! here.

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Can economics be morally centered? And perhaps more importantly, should it be?

These are questions that society is grappling with in the face of the economics profession's failure to confront the global impact of exploding inequality within and between countries. Read more

INET Spotlight – Ben Bernanke to Economists: More Philosophy, Please

by The Institute for... on August 07, 2012 2 comments

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman and philosopher?

This week Bernanke spoke to the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, and, as Bloomberg Businessweek notes, he was singing a different tune. Read more

The Visible Hand Writing History

by Pedro G Duarte on July 09, 2012

[We are inaugurating something new in this blog: a jointly written post!]

Let’s propose an exercise (simplistic in many dimensions). Read the following abstract of a paper and decide whether or not it looks publishable in either A) a top economics journal or B) a top history of economics journal? Read more