Archive

When they told me I was expected to teach “Introduction à l’économie” this year, I thought, OK, this is straight. Every economist knows how to do that.

The Eurocrisis has many dimensions—bank solvency crisis, sovereign debt crisis, political unity crisis, and economic/unemployment crisis—but time after time it has been the liquidity crisis dimension driving events, and ECB response to the liquidity crisis driving institutional evolution. The reason is simple. Liquidity kills you quick.

Contemporary mainstream economics has widely “poisoned the well” from which people get their ideas about the relationship between economics and ethics.

Mathematics and the ‘Whiz Kids’

Two Nobel laureates, an election, and a shaky economy. The message? We can do a whole lot better.

What do you get when you put two of the most well known and most widely cited economists in the world, both Nobel laureates, on stage together? A healthy dose of economic reality.

China released quarterly GDP figures this week. Wen Jiabao emphasized the parts of the release that pointed toward stabilization, and one can certainly find some logic to that view.

The British Corn Returns data provided the empirical basis for the fierce debate around the introduction and repeal of the 19th century British Corn Laws. Contemporary readers, like David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, followed them as closely as stock market prices of today. Much of 19th century political economy rested on contemporaries’ interpretations of this data.

INET co-founder George Soros has been awarded the Adam Smith Award by the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), an association of business economists.

MWG introduces the theory of consumer behavior by presenting two distinct approaches to modeling consumer behavior, the preference-based approach (based upon unobservable preferences generating a utility function) and the choice-based approach (based upon observable choice behavior), and attempting to establish connections between the two.

What makes a good model?

a lack of US growth may lead to a fall in the dollar’s popularity, and the result could be a global liquidity shortage.

In this post, I would like to explore the views of preferences and behavior outlined in MWG Ch.1, and specifically the view of rationality developed in this first chapter.

Climate change policy is caught in a stalemate between those who fear the environmental consequences of not doing enough and those who fear the economic consequences of overreacting. But controversy over the extent and sources of climate change need not stand in the way of a positive economic policy response.

Everyone wants to ring-fence something, but they can’t agree on what: Vickers, Liikanen, Volcker.