Articles

A Response to Heiner Flassbeck’s questions about the Institute’s Council on the Euro Crisis

A few weeks ago, I attended the H2S 4th workshop on “Cross disciplinary ventures in postwar American Social Sciences,” (research program outline here).

Last weekend, I was in Tübingen - very close to my home town: the same smell, the same surreal Swabian idyll that makes you think of Hölderlin and Hesse rather than DSGE.

After the recent election brought a center-right coalition to power, what’s next in the Greek crisis? Are we finally in the clear? Not so fast, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis says. Varoufakis explains the real outcome we can except after Greek voters’ “contradictory verdict,” where 55% voted for anti-bailout parties yet a pro-bailout government resulted due to the nature of Greece’s electoral system.

In a recent post I wrote: “I am sure it will not take long before Journal of the History of Economic Thought (Cambridge Uni. Press) makes that list [Thompson Reuters, Social Science Citation Index].”

Our usual problem in history (of economics) is a lack of information.

In conversation recently, I was called upon to defend the claim that banks are in the business of creating and destroying private money.

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.

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.

Having just started Findlay and O’Rourke’s mammoth history of world trade in the second millenia, I have been struck by a strange incongruity