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Great Hospitality or Chance to Innovate?

by Local Historian on April 04, 2013

some personal touches to hospitality at the INET conference, although I feel for the people who have been holding that sign all day.

with thanks to an anonymous commenter for pointing this out, although they might just have run out of poster stands.

Changing of the Guard? - INET and FGI Press Conference in Hong Kong

Rob Johnson (Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking), Andrew Sheng (President of the Fung Global Institute), and Yu Yongding (INET Advisory Board member and Director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at CASS) speak at a press conference on April 3 before INET's "Changing of the Guard?" conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in Hong Kong. Read more

I Have to Act Like an Adult in Hong Kong

by Benjamin Mitra-Kahn on April 02, 2013 1 comment

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

Digitally Tracking Technologies and Their Effects Across Time and Space

Project Leader:

Michelle Alexopoulos

This project uses information from digitized Google books and library catalogues to create new measures of technological innovation and diffusion for OECD countries from 1850 to the present. Once completed, the new series will be used, first, to map the waves of innovation over time and space, second, to estimate the economic impact of the technologies, third, to plot technological diffusion both within and across countries, and, fourth, to re-examine the nature and economic consequences of general purpose technologies. The results will further our understanding of business cycles and the contribution of technical change to growth and to international productivity and income differentials.

Rethinking Expectations: The Way Forward for Macroeconomics

by The Institute for... on January 16, 2013 1 comment

INET is pleased to announce that Roman Frydman, Chair of INET’s Program on Imperfect Knowledge Economics, has published a book with Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel laureate and Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, Rethinking Expectations: The Way Forward for Macroeconomics (Princeton University Press). Read more

The Theory of the Firm: Language, Model and Reality

by Sanjay Reddy on November 18, 2012 1 comment

In a previous post we queried whether the theory of the consumer as developed in the first three chapters of Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green (and indeed other comparable texts) provides anything by way of content beyond what is implied by the abstract description of consumers as agents who are maximizing something. [We did not discuss chapter four, on aggregation of demand, to which we may return later]. As we noted then, a comparable point can be made about the theory of the firm. Read more

Rigor Mortis?

by Sanjay Reddy on October 25, 2012 11 comments

Mathematics and the ‘Whiz Kids’

An important part of the rhetoric of Mas-Colell, Green and Whinston’s Microeconomic Theory (as with other such texts) is that it employs formal or mathematical methods because this provides analytical ‘rigor’ (perhaps understood as a relation of logical inescapability tying conclusions to premises combined with a framework of generality underpinned by abstraction). On this view, mathematics, even if it serves as a barrier to entry to specialized discussions employing it, has a vital and irreplaceable role to play. The lack of comfort of many with mathematical ‘language’ in economics has, as a social fact, led to the establishment o Read more

Situating Microeconomics

by Sanjay Reddy on September 27, 2012 10 comments

Microeconomics: A Non-definition Read more

Interdisciplinarity and education @H2S workshop

by Beatrice Cherrier on July 11, 2012

A few weeks ago, I attended the H2S 4th workshop on "Cross disciplinary ventures in postwar American Social Sciences," (research program outline here Read more

Asking questions about paradigms and INET

by Benjamin Mitra-Kahn on April 12, 2012

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