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A conflict which revolves around key economic policy differences on questions such as rules vs. discretion, solidarity vs. liability, liquidity vs. solvency and austerity vs. stimulus.

Donald Trump’s presidency is a symptom of an interregnum between economic orders – a period that will result in a new balance between state and market. While his administration’s economic policies are unlikely to provide the right answer, they may at least show the world what not to do.

Institute President Rob Johnson interviewed by the New Yorker on hedge-fund managers and the market for air strips in New Zealand

From physicists to engineers to meds to plumbers: thoughts on Esther Duflo’s ASSA 2017 lecture on rediscovering the last art of economics

The YSI Economic History Working Group and the YSI Financial Stability Working Group are hosting a webinar series on the “Institutional Responses to Financial Crises, 1870 to 2017”. 

Beatrice Cherrier remembers Tony Atkinson’s influential intellectual, educational and institutional contribution to the field of public economics

Viewed in historical context, the weak recovery from the 2008 crisis has been slow and painful, but a sub-5% unemployment rate and healthy job and wage growth will be among the most important legacies Obama leaves to the next president

Any effort to replace the Affordable Care Act will be confronted by the same structural imbalances in the health care economy that the legislation’s authors faced

New evidence shows personal wealth interests drive Congressional votes

As part of an International Economy symposium, INET Research Director Tom Ferguson assessed the challenge facing central bankers through the lens of the missing virtues of Dorothy’s travel companions in the Wizard of Oz

A concentration of wealth and power that created a twin crisis of representation — in politics, and in expertise — set the stage for Donald Trump’s election victory, and has put America’s founding principles at risk

Presented by Professor Dan O’Flaherty at the Institute’s conference on the economics of race in Detroit on 11 November, 2016

There is no good case for major deregulation of the US financial sector, warns INET Board Chairman Adair Turner, and any backsliding by a Trump administration on banks’ capital requirements instituted globally after 2008 will be very dangerous

Evidence thus far questions the assumption that robotics are eliminating jobs. INET Senior Vice President for Programs Rick McGahey says the UBI debate should focus on the long-term weakening of labor’s bargaining power

Riots, lynchings and other forms of violence dramatically disproportionate impact on the lives and prospects of African inventors. That’s just one indicator, says Professor Lisa Cook, of the profound impact of racial violence on the economic structure

Beijing’s leaders face a critical dilemma over a credit boom that imperils China’s prospects for a smooth transition to a sustainable economic path

Extract from the keynote speech by the Rev. Dr. William Barber III at the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference on race and economics in Detroit on November 11

Professor Marlene Kim provided a riveting picture, via her personal family history of the exploitation of the Asian-American working-class in California. She challenged the invisibility of Asian-Americans in discussions of race in America, and also focused on the double burden of discrimination borne by women of color.

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

Campaign promises aside, the policies favored by President-elect Donal Trump are likely to bring more pain than gain to  working-class Americans 

Black Lives Matter movement co-founder Alicia Garza, addressing the Institute’s Detroit conference on the economics of race, placed the turmoil created by the 2016 election in the context of a backlash against the gains made by social movements challenging racial and social injustice. She argued that those movements now need, more than ever, “to show up for one another” at a local level to protect those gains

The prominence of the debate over ‘reswitching’ has obscured the importance of Piero Sraffa’s profound contribution to economics. It’s time to revisit and build on that body of work

Former Treasury Secretary Paul Volcker reviews a life’s work and the pressing challenges of the moment in conversation with Institute for New Economic Thinking President Rob Johnson

Beneath the heated political rhetoric over U.S.-China economic ties lies an increasingly complex reality

Research funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking has revealed that the SEC reports executive compensation using a formula that routinely undercounts it

Significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric

Milwaukee-born short-seller Jim Chanos, founder and managing partner of New York-based Kynikos Associates, teaches University of Wisconsin and Yale business students about corporate fraud. During his life and career, he has witnessed seismic shifts in economic thinking and the relationship between labor and capital. Chanos shares his thoughts on the world emerging from the election of Donald Trump and the tumultuous political events of 2016. 

Students in Europe have created an important resource for those seeking alternative curricular materials

What Donald Trump does well, Professor john a. powell explains, is link economic concerns with ontological and racial concerns among his voters. Many economists and social justice activists, by contrast, try to reduce racial concerns to economic and class concerns. His presentation demonstrates the centrality, conscious or unconscious, of belonging and ‘otherness’ in comprehending the structures of society.

Institute for New Economic Thinking-backed research into inequality explores how taxes and government policy have contributed to deepening economic inequality   

In the 40th anniversary year of John Kenneth Galbraith’s Age of Uncertainty, the 1970s look remarkably stable in comparison with today’s turbulent world 

Amid heightened focus on conflicts of interests, new research shows how legislators’ votes on the 2008 bank bailout tracked with the exposure to peril of their personal stock portfolios

The big question in Asian countries right now is what lesson to take from Donald Trump’s victory in the United States’ presidential election, and from the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum, in which British voters opted to leave the European Union. Unfortunately, the focus is not where it should be: geopolitical change.

A discussion on President-elect Trump’s economic agenda and its implications for the U.S. and world economies.

New research by Nobel Laureate and Institute for New Economic Thinking Advisory Board member James Heckman finds strong economic gains from birth-to-five education programs 

The Institute for New Economic Thinking’s recent Detroit event on race and economics noted both the structural impediments faced by African-Americans, and the impressive gains made in some communities despite those headwinds

As the world turns upside down, Mariana Mazzucato discusses how to shape an economy that works for everyone

Joe Earle, co-founder of The Post-Crash Economics Society, member of Rethinking Economics and co-author of the Econocracy, explains why his group is trying to democratize economics as a conversation and a policy–making process.

Slight increases in national-average earnings for older workers mask long-run stagnation and decline in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – states that unexpectedly voted for Donal Trump

Remedies have failed to produced growth and reduce indebtedness because they’re focused on protecting toxic behavior by banks in Europe’s core countries

The Volcker Alliance has launched a series of new papers with important proposals for reforming financial regulations to guard against future crises 

On June 2, 1965, under a mandate established by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Congress created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws related to employment. The expectation was that African Americans would be prime beneficiaries of the EEOC.

The Volcker Alliance and the Institute for New Economic Thinking convened a group of influential thinkers for a half-day forum to discuss regulatory and structural changes needed to ensure the stability and resilience of financial markets. 

Nobel laureate argues that the party’s adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy has hurt its prospects

The business corporation is the central economic institution in a modern economy. A company’s senior executives, with the advice and support of the board of directors, are responsible for the allocation of corporate resources to investments in productive capabilities. Senior executives also advise the board on the extent to which, given the need to invest in productive capabilities, the company can afford to make cash distributions to shareholders. Motivating corporate resource-allocation decisions are the modes of remuneration that incentivize and reward the top executives of these companies. A sound analysis of the operation and performance of a modern economy requires an understanding of not only how much these executives are paid but also the ways in which the prevailing system of executive pay influences their decisions to allocate corporate resources.

Neither do rapid growth in government debt, declining interest rates, or rapid increases in a central bank’s balance sheet

Flows of goods and services, people and capital have overwhelmed the ability of political processes to accommodate them

Real existing neoliberalism as a set of social facts distinct from a purist ideology has proven remarkably adaptable and politically resilient 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies allowed the United States to avoid the perils of right-wing populism that plunged Europe into war in the 1930s — Europe should learn from his example

Columbia professor Dan O’Flaherty explains how an awareness of racial trauma developed from growing up in Newark inspired him to write and teach on the economics of race.

Viewing economic outcomes as divorced from politics risks serious misunderstanding and virtually ensures regulatory failure.

What we’re reading: Some analysts expect dramatic changes and a short-term boost to the US economy, others predict continuity — and see Trump’s election reflecting a sea change in the global order

By suddenly eliminating two widely used bank notes, India’s government risks undermining public confidence in the basic means of exchange

Surviving the geopolitical and economic challenges of the coming years requires a world order less vulnerable to the vagaries of U.S. elections

How orthodox economics paved the way for the political shocks of 2016

The YSI Working Group on Economic Development, the Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre (GPERC) of the University of Greenwich, and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) would like to invite you to a talk by Professor Tim Jackson. 

International trade and investment are vital drivers of economic growth. As the size and shape of the world economy enters a new period of change, trade patterns reflect an evolving reality

By suppressing important questions in favor of being cheerleaders for globalization, economists failed to influence the public conversation

How economics underperforms in diversity, and some potential remedies

The TPP is dead, as is the assumption that future free-trade agreements can be negotiated by experts alone

Mission-oriented public investment is vital to spur a revival of private-sector investment

A conversation with Isaac Stone Fish, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for U.S. – China Relations and Asia Editor at Foreign Policy Magazine.

Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Network, shares a vision of how to bring economic opportunity to women of color

This paper analyzes white attitudes towards African Americans in the United States at different points in a business cycle from 1979- 2014.

In his keynote address to our #EconOfRace conference in Detroit, Rev. Dr. William Barber III issued a blistering critique of structural inequality in the United States, and urged economists to recognize their responsibility to the poor.

Renowned campaigner for social and economic justice to set the tone in conference keynote

Economics has a race problem.

Prof. Marlene Kim says her research has revealed that African-American women face triple penalties from race and gender bias, and the combination of those two

Getting rid of barriers to economic security is possible with the right policies at the right time. 

Hoping to learn from other countries’ experiences in organizing finance for agriculture, more than 150 Americans were sent abroad in the summer of 1913 to investigate the minutiae of farm-credit systems in and around Europe.

Language has always been a way to divide, conquer, classify, and control, but it also helps to constitute who we are and what we think. 

In an Al Jazeera documentary “In Search of the Great American Job”, Institute scholar William Lazonick offers some arch insights into the relationship between financialization — particularly the “shareholder value” ideology in corporations, which drives the transfer of profits to shareholders through stock buybacks — and job creation and inequality.

Economists offer widely different explanations for the decline in trade between nations, in a debate that remains unresolved but is increasingly urgent

Renowned campaigner for social and economic justice to set the tone in conference keynote

Economist Darrick Hamilton and Institute President Rob Johnson discuss “stratification economics”, which addresses the failure of orthodox economics to see, explain and point to remedies for persistent racial inequality.

A conversation with Richard Vague, Managing Partner at Gabriel Investments and Chairman of the Governor’s Woods Foundation.

Seven dangers of chronically low interest rates amid austerity and fiscal-policy phobia

This paper analyzes the Euro crisis in light of the experience of center-periphery relations over the last 40 years of renewed financial globalization.

Black Americans remain second-class citizens in access to housing finance

Oral contraception created a population that, today, is disproportionately inclined to save, resulting in low to negative real interest rates. Excess eurozone savings can only be accomodated by raising sovereign debt levels

Young women of all races and gender identities are powering movements from Black Lives Matter to immigration reform to reproductive justice to minimum wage and beyond. Researchers need to support their progress with metrics that capture the spirit they are building

Scholar sees Institute for New Economic Thinking conference as an important opportunity to discuss issues of race and economics, and of Detroit’s past and future 

Offshoring manufacturing may have hurt many working people in America, but professionals and intellectual property have been robustly protected

Wired profiles Color of Change leader Rashad Robinson and explores the challenges of movement-building in an era of digital activism

Historian Prof. Thomas Sugrue offers a critique of the conventional wisdom that roots the city’s fate in the racial tension of the tumultuous ‘60s and the decline of the auto industry.

Darrick Hamilton calls for spreading the benefits of asset-ownership to all Americans.

Like the Great Depression and the stagflation of the ’70s, the anemic growth of the U.S. economy can’t be understood or remedied without changes in economists’ thinking

In this Q-and-A, historian and National Book Award finalist Heather Ann Thompson argues that draconian police tactics in black Detroit neighborhoods had as much to do with the city’s decimation as white flight and lost jobs.

Improvements in data collection create potential for better outcomes for the LGBT community.

Institute for New Economic Thinking President Robert Johnson, in an appearance of the CNN International show Quest Means Business, warns that the anger of Trump’s supporters is unlikely to ebb absent significant economic and political changes — and that this anger could be more successfully marshaled by a more skilled and sophisticated Republican challenger four years from now. 

Theoretical dogmas that are literally blind to the causes of the racism that determines the economic fates of most African-Americans leaves the economics profession unable to comprehend or recognize remedies for a key driver of America’s crippling inequality. Instead, conventional economic models unmindfully shape policies that actually exacerbate racial conflict.

We examine whether personal wealth interests affect politicians’ decisions about stabilizing financial markets.