Economics Profession

Princeton Professor Markus Brunnermeier gives some advice to young economists: be curious, break out of existing paradigms, and think about the long run: in ten years or more, what will be the big economic questions? Interviewed by Peter Leyden at King's College, April 2010.

Pierpaolo Barbieri, a student at Cambridge's Trinity College, believes that using social networking and new technologies like Google Wave can provide a whole new dimension to collaboration. He thinks that Google Wave is especially promising, because it allows collaborators to share audio and video, in real time. Interviewed by Peter Leyden at King's College, April 2010.

John Evans, the general secretary for the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD, says that the many imbalances which have come to light in the recent financial crisis are not accidents; they are in fact failures of the old paradigms of economic thinking. Interviewed by Daniel Erasmus at King's College, April 2010.

From MIT to IMF

By the evidence of the recent IMF conference, there is apparently now consensus that the global financial crisis has killed--“shattered” (David Romer), “destroyed” (Stiglitz)--pre-crisis academic economic orthodoxy. But that orthodoxy had many dimensions, and there is no consensus on where repair efforts are most immediately necessary.

Instead, we see a division of labor emerging in which everyone focuses on that one dimension where they feel themselves to have some special expertise. In such a situation, an overall map may be helpful for making sense of the reconstruction effort as a whole. Read more