Archive

Europe is embarked on a grand experiment, managing modern financial crisis without a dealer of last resort, so refusing to follow the lead of the 2008 Fed.

On November 2nd, I was sitting in the Hayden Library Special Collection reading room at MIT, browsing archives on the undergraduate and graduate students’ discontent during the early 70s and the response of the economics department faculty.

Amid mass unemployment and economic turmoil, instructors who lecture on the superiority of free markets without acknowledging the dysfunction in the wider economy are at risk of appearing out of touch and exacerbating antipathy towards economics.

Cosma Shalizi urges economists to stop doing what they are doing: Fitting large complex models to a small set of highly correlated time series data.

INET published a paper, written by John Kay, that deals with the relationship between economics and the world we live in. The Map Is Not the Territory: An Essay on the State of Economics spells out methodological critiques of economic theory in general, and of DSGE models and rational expectations in particular.

A week ago, Mark Carney, chairman of the Financial Stability Board, warned of emerging global consequences of the escalating eurozone crisis.

The INET roundtable on “new conversations and the academy” took place a week ago. Most panelists were bloggers, including Mike Konczal from RortyBomb and Noah Smith from Noahopinion.

A recent e-mail conversation I had with Harro Maas concerning one of my latest drafts (shameless self-promotion) made me buy and read Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s, Merchants of Doubts.

The following text was sent to us by Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman, we reproduce it in its entirety.

Professors Roger Backhouse and Brad Bateman wrote an op-ed for the New York Times a few days ago, arguing that “thanks to decades of academic training in the “dentistry” approach to economics, today’s Keynes or Friedman is nowhere to be found” - we have stopped thinking big they say.

The Toxic Textbooks movement devotes energy to curriculum reform as well. Its purpose is to galvanize student protests and “encourage schools and universities to use economics textbooks that engage honestly with the real world.”

This is the question I’m supposed to answer for an experimental INET conference aimed at inspiring new thinking through interdisciplinary conversation and collective reflection without rules.

Yesterday, Harvard students of Ec 10 staged a walkout to draw attention to the bias they detect in the course.

My first TV chat show performance: