Articles

The Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford researchers and collaborators data mine 200 years of US Patent Office records to uncover the true nature of innovation.

The forthcoming Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. When we think about innovation we tend to imagine the future. But as with so many subjects in economics, it’s also useful to examine the past.

What is “capital”? To Karl Marx, it was a social, political, and legal category—the means of control of the means of production by the dominant class. Capital could be money, it could be machines; it could be fixed and it could be variable. But the essence of capital was neither physical nor financial. It was the power that capital gave to capitalists, namely the authority to make decisions and to extract surplus from the worker.

We invited Thomas Scheiding from Cardinal Stritch University to review what we know about the scholarly communication process in economics. Tom has written forcefully on the history and economics of economic literature (see for instance, his 2009 JEM article). His latest is a study of the scholarly communication process in physics (an article in Studies).

Inflation targeting insufficient: central banks and governments must manage the quantity and mix of credit created

I’ve already blogged on how undergraduate education evolved at MIT in the postwar era here and here, but since Mike Konczal and Paul Krugman make the case that, to bring introductory economics closer to the real world, macro should be taught before micro as Samuelson did in the first 13 editions of his Economics textbook, it may be worth returning to it.

In the past decade, the volume of literature in the history of economics has been of 500 articles and just under 50 books a year. The graph below traces the count in two year intervals (articles left axis, books right axis). The absolute volume is stable but given the growth of economic literature in the period, stable might be rebranded as static.

The destruction of trust is not an accident.

The rescue of Cyprus was a microcosm of how the nations of Europe have failed to work together to adequately address their ongoing financial crises.

If Congress and the White House fail to raise the debt ceiling this week and the United States defaults on its debt, what can we expect and how can we protect ourselves against these events?