Archive
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Article
Where the World Economic Association Started
Apr 4, 2013
Having lunch next to Edward Fullbrook he told me the story of how the post-autistic economic review got its start, leading to what we today know as the World Economic Association and all the great work coming from this community.
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Article
Great Hospitality or Chance to Innovate?
Apr 4, 2013
Some personal touches to hospitality at the INET conference, although I feel for the people who have been holding that sign all day.
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Article
Kuhn vs Lakatos: it is not the institute of anything goes...
Apr 4, 2013
In his opening remarks, Robert Johnson said that this “is not the institute of anything goes” with INET now getting to a point where it needs to stop criticising the mainstream and should instead “create a new vision.”
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Webinars and Events
Changing of the Guard
PlenaryApr 4–7, 2013
The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its annual plenary conference in Hong Kong from April 4-7, 2013 at the InterContinental Hotel in Kowloon. The event discussed Asia’s emergence in the global economy and other core issues.
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Working Paper
Conference paperSomething for Everyone: Building Incentives for Innovation Ecosystems
Apr 2013
Healthy innovation economies are the main driver of prosperity in the 21st century. But the three players that have traditionally sponsored basic research and invention in those economies are no longer willing or able to perform that role.
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Conference Session
Growth Adjustment and Convergence in Asia: The Challenge Ahead?
Apr 3, 2013 | 08:20—09:15
The developed economies of Europe, North America, and Japan are facing tremendous challenges related to indebtedness and stagnation. How will the developing economies of Asia respond to this challenge as they reorient their growth strategies to meet the rising aspirations oftheir people?
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Conference Session
Intersubjectivity: René Girard's Vision of Mimetic Desire and Economic Dynamics
Apr 3, 2013 | 10:45—11:15
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Conference Session
Innovation Systems
Apr 3, 2013 | 09:15—10:15
The Foundations of Economic Prosperity: The Lessons of Innovation Process and History
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Working Paper
Conference paperScarcity, Preferences and Cooperation: A Mimetic Analysis
Apr 2013
In “The Ambivalence of Scarcity” which is my contribution to L’Enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique de l’économie, written by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and originally published in French in 1978, I attempt to apply mimetic theory to modern economics and to economicphenomena, and also to explain why economic issues and economics as a discipline occupy such an important place in the modern world.
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Working Paper
Conference paperMonetary and Financial Stability: Lessons from the Crisis and from classic economics texts
Apr 2013
My remarks today will be focused primarily on features of the developed world’s financial system which led to the crisis of 2008 and to the Great Recession that followed, from which we are only slowly and painfully emerging.
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Working Paper
Conference paperComments by William White on the Presentation by Lord Adair Turner
Apr 2013
In his recent lecture at the Cass Business School, Lord Turner noted that even mentioning the possibility of overt monetary financing was akin to breaking a taboo.
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Working Paper
Conference paperDavid Sainsbury: Innovation Systems
Apr 2013
A striking feature of the neoclassical economic theory which has been dominant in Western universities in recent years is that it has had so little to say about innovation and innovation policy which is useful for policy-makers.
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Working Paper
Conference paperCrisis and the Sacred
Apr 2013
It would be nonsensical to blame economists for not foreseeing the crisis; even less for causing it. It was obvious there would be a crisis. It was impossible to foresee how it would start and evolve, and at what moment these events would occur.
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Working Paper
Conference paperIndividual Judgments, Social Values, and Mimetic Interactions
Apr 2013
The problem of value has always occupied a central place in economic thought and debate.
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Conference Session
Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Stability: Lessons of the Historical Experience with Fiat Money and the Implications for the Future
Apr 3, 2013 | 11:30—12:30
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Article
A new way of thinking in economics
Apr 2, 2013
What is the purpose of economics?
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Article
I Have to Act Like an Adult in Hong Kong
Apr 1, 2013
The INET conference in Hong Kong is serious business.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperIf Technology Has Arrived Everywhere, Why Has Income Diverged?
Mar 2013
We study the lags with which new technologies are adopted across countries, and their long-run penetration rates once they are adopted.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperThe Inevitability of Shadowy Banking
Mar 2013
Shadowy banking is safety-net arbitrage. It employs substitutes for products and activities performed within the traditional banking sector.
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Article
As Goes Cyprus, So Goes the European Union
Mar 31, 2013
All of a sudden, tiny Cyprus is making headlines. How could such a small country, with an economy approximately the size of the State of Maranhao, create such big problems?
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Article
Meeting New Challenges in China
Mar 27, 2013
Further system reforms will enable China to overcome middle-income trap and push forward social progress
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Article
The Consequences of a Leaderless Economy
Mar 26, 2013
What happens when there’s no leader in the global economy?
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Article
Russia to the Rescue of Cyprus?
Mar 20, 2013
There is a certain rich irony attached to the sight of corrupt Russian oligarchs now posing as liberal champions of the rule of law as they find themselves sucked into the maelstrom of Cyprus’s ongoing financial crisis.
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News
Complex Networks in Finance: Nature Physics Journal on Financial Complexity
Mar 19, 2013
Why Nature Physics has released an issue focusing on physicists and economists considering the state-of-the-art in the application of network science to finance?
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Working Paper
Grantee paperAggregate Demand, Instability, and Growth
Feb 2013
This paper considers a puzzle in growth theory from a Keynesian perspective.
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Working Paper
Journal articleFinancialization and U.S. Income Inequality, 1970–2008
Feb 2013
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Article
How the Economic Quacks Promoting Austerity Will Increase the Deficit
Feb 28, 2013
Why all of the fuss about a nonexistent emergency?
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News
Between Free and Forced Labor
Feb 25, 2013
An innovative new paper by INET grantee Suresh Naidu
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Article
History of Economics and Images: static and dynamic
Feb 23, 2013
There has been an important movement towards making available on the web a host of open courses.
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Webinars and Events
Global Inequality @Columbia
DiscussionFeb 21, 2013
The relatively new field of inequality studies is gaining increasing momentum as economic disparity grows throughout the world, in advanced countries as well as less developed ones—especially in the United States.
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News
IKE Co-founder Michael Goldberg Awarded Todd H. Crockett Professor of Economics
Feb 18, 2013
Michael Goldberg was awarded last week the Todd H. Crockett Professor of Economics at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire.
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Article
How Do We Get Out of This Mess?
Feb 5, 2013
That’s the question that Adair Turner, Chair of the UK Financial Services Authority, was addressing in his lecture to Cass Business School this week.
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News
Adair Turner: How Do We Get Out of This Mess?
Feb 5, 2013
Turner’s speech at the UK Financial Services Authority
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News
What is Shadow Banking?
Feb 4, 2013
ft. INET’s Perry Mehrling
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Article
Economic “fields” as historical objects (not yet)
Jan 31, 2013
The notion of “field” is so pervasive that economists hardly pay conscious attention to it.
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Article
The challenge of “value-ladeness” for history writing
Jan 30, 2013
Although the objectivity-Grail Quest has ended with total success decades ago (so economists say), the question of the possibility and consequences of economists’ values smuggling into their daily practice still periodically surfaces, and crises make good times for such debates.
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Video
Piero Sraffa's Price Theory Without Equilibrium
Jan 28, 2013
Piero Sraffa’s classic work Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities has been variously interpreted as a special case of modern neoclassical general equilibrium or a foundation stone for the revival of the classical tradition of Smith and Ricardo.
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News
Markets Should Serve Society
Jan 28, 2013
What is the purpose of markets?
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News
INET and World Economic Forum to Collaborate on Future of Economics
Jan 21, 2013
The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and the World Economic Forum today announced plans for closer collaboration to foster new approaches to economic thinking.
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Article
Paul Samuelson and the History of Economics
Jan 21, 2013
Paul Samuelson is well-known to have been a compulsive citer and for having a particular Whig program for the history of economics
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Article
ASSA Meetings: a Showcase for the History of Economics?
Jan 20, 2013
Economists and historians of economics have related differently over time, and the past of the discipline has then served for varied purposes.
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News
The Future of Greece and the Euro Zone Event, January 24th
Jan 16, 2013
On January 24 2013, the Workers’ Rights Student Coalition at Columbia Law School will host an INET-sponsored evening with top political leadership from SYRIZA, Greece’s dominant opposition party and anticipated next government, to discuss the challenges facing Greece and the euro zone and SYRIZA’s plans for reform.
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News
Rethinking Expectations: The Way Forward for Macroeconomics
Jan 15, 2013
INET is pleased to announce that Roman Frydman, Chair of INET’s Program on Imperfect Knowledge Economics, has published a book with Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel laureate and Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, Rethinking Expectations: The Way Forward for Macroeconomics (Princeton University Press).
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Video
The Next Economic Frontier and the Wild World of Non-Rational Expectations
Jan 14, 2013
One of the fundamental ideas of modern economics — that people have rational expectations, an unbiased, statistically correct view of the future — is, in reality, a simple hypothesis.
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Article
Fixing finance: The missing piece in banking reform
Jan 10, 2013
Eric Beinhocker and Tony Dolphin argue that lasting reform to the financial sector will not be achieved without tackling the price rigging and anti-competitive behaviour that is rife in the industry.
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Article
Jurassic Economics at ASSA-AEA 2013
Jan 9, 2013
The History of Economics Society (HES) held four sessions at the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) 2013 meeting, in San Diego, Jan. 4-6: “Keynes and the International Monetary System” (co-organized by Robert Dimand and Rebeca Gomez Betancourt), “Writing MIT’s History” (organized by E. Roy Weintraub and having our blog fellow Yann Giraud presenting), “Looking for Best Practices in Economic Journalism: Past and Present” (organized by our blog fellow Tiago Mata), and “Real Business Cycle after Three Decades: Past, Present and Future” (a panel discussion co-organized by Warren L. Young and Sumru Altug).
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Article
Open to be open to be open…
Jan 8, 2013
INET has chosen the label “openness” to describe New Economic Thinking - “open” for other disciplines, for other methods, for other questions, for other interpretations, etc. It’s easy to hurrah.
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Video
Behind the Scenes of International Banking Regulation
Jan 7, 2013
Five years into the Great Recession, discussion and political fights continue about the right approach to international banking supervision. How to avert the next financial crisis or at the very least lessen its damage?
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Webinars and Events
Azim Premji Winter School 2013
WorkshopJan 6–17, 2013
The Azim Premji University-Institute for Economic Thinking Advanced Graduate Workshop in Poverty, Development and Globalization is interested in identifying the complex global interactions that influence poverty and development as well as the development strategies that have proven successful in promoting equitable growth, promoting capabilities, and reducing poverty.
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Video
The Survival of the Riskiest
Jan 2, 2013
Financial fragility does not fall from the sky. That’s why treating risk as if it comes from exogenous shocks can’t capture the reality of financial markets.
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Grant
Years granted: 2015, 2014, 2013The Measurement and Assessment of Inequalities on a World Scale
This research project continues the work of the University of Texas Inequality Project, developing new data and research in several technical areas.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013Model Complexity and Prediction Error in Macroeconomic Forecasting
This research project extends proven techniques in statistical learning theory so that they cover the kind of models and data of most interest to macroeconomic forecasting.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013Extending Macroeconomics and Developing a Dynamic Monetary Simulation Tool
This research project develops a software program for economic simulation that makes it easy to develop dynamic, monetary models of the macro-economy.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013The Causes of Falling Wage Share and Prospects for Growth with Equality in a Globalized Economy
This research project analyzes the determinants of wage share, taking account of country-specific institutional aspects, in order to contribute to the theory of distribution, combining insights from political economy, institutional economics, and industrial relations.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013Policy Implications of Darwinian Versus Newtonian Views of the Economy
This research project considers and casts doubts on the stationarity properties of macroeconomic data that are key to New Classical models with implications for the understanding of long-term economic growth, shorter term business cycles, stabilization policy, and industrial and development policy.
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Grant
Years granted: 2012, 2013Greening Economic Growth: How can Environmental Regulation Enhance Innovation and Competitiveness?
This research project explores the relationship between environmental regulation, innovation, and competitiveness through a meta-analysis, which extracts key implications for economic thinking and future research, and unique datasets on patented “environmental” inventions.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013A Failure to Communicate? Central Bank Guidance in Good Times and Bad
This research project aims to better understand the impact of various forms of central bank communication by blending techniques from psychology and political science.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013Monetary Reform and the Bellagio Group: Selected Letters and Papers of Fritz Machlup, Robert Triffin and William Fellner
This research project compiles and annotates the archival legacy of the Bellagio Group’s founders Fritz Machlup, Robert Triffin, and William Fellner as they sought to reform the international financial system between 1963 and 1974.
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Grant
Years granted: 2012, 2013A Constructive Critique of Economic Modeling
This research project argues that economics currently lacks the capability to assess when mathematical modeling, on its own, is a sufficient means for understanding a given set of social phenomena.
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Grant
Years granted: 2012, 2013Eliciting Maternal Knowledge about the Technology of Skill Formation
This research project collects data that measures maternal knowledge about the impacts of investments on child development and estimates the role such knowledge plays in the determination of economic and social inequality.
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Grant
Years granted: 2012, 2013Scarcity: Historicizing the First Principle of Political Economy
This research project examines the political and ideological implications of different ways of framing the relationship between humanity, nature, and the world of goods.
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Grant
Years granted: 2012, 2013Geometric Marginalism
This research project provides the mathematics for a second marginal revolution enabling the natural modeling of heterogeneous agents with unstable beliefs, fully dynamic preferences, and allowances for an increased level of self-inconsistency.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013An Agent-Based Model of the Current Economic Crisis
This research project creates a computational model of the current financial crisis to discover the essential elements needed to reproduce the crisis, while investigating alternative policies that may have reduced its intensity and strategies for recovery.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013A Spatial Approach to Macroeconomic Inference
This research project uses spatial cross-sectional variation in addition to time series variation to estimate fiscal multipliers; the impact of anti-predatory lending laws on housing prices, default rates, and foreclosures; and the impact of raising wages during recessions.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013In Search of the Financial Accelerator
This research project explores how the output of firms outside of the financial sector is affected by the health of the banks and other financial institutions.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013Technology-Skill Complementarity on the Eve of the Industrial Resolution: New Evidence from England (1710-1772)
This research project focuses on the effect of the technological changes that led to the British Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century on the market for skilled workers.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013Long Term Costs of Macroeconomic Instability: The Destruction of Innovative Networks in Cleveland, Ohio, 1920-1940
This research project will examine the long-term costs of macroeconomic instability in a major metropolitan area and the direct impact of macroeconomic shocks on technological discovery.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and its Influence on Market Liberal Policy Norms, c. 1968-2000
This research project investigates the influence of economic doctrines on policy norms in recent decades through analysis of the history of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013Developing a Case for Emotional Finance
This research project explores ways to influence policy, starting with selected UK regulators, pension funds, and asset management groups, by testing the feasibility of “emotional finance” solutions to the prevention of future financial crises.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013Origins of the Graduate Economics Canon in the United States
This research project explores and documents the development of graduate economics training in the leading centers of doctoral education in the United States.
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Grant
Years granted: 2011, 2012, 2013Competition and Equality in Imperial China
This research project uncovers the economic forces which reshaped the evolution of the imperial examination system in traditional China, using a new dataset from archival sources of ancient Chinese Books.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013Finance Without Crises
This research project examines the relationship between the creation of money, price formation, and income flows, assuming no restrictions to the volume of credit, while abstracting from the existence of speculative crises and the role of the public sector in the process of monetary creation.
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Grant
Years granted: 2013The Significance of Inequality: Between Economics and Philosophy
This research project shows what economists can learn from political philosophers in thinking about economic inequality while also investigating the philosophical significance of recent empirical work on inequality, within economics and elsewhere.
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News
US Economy on Cliff's Edge: INET's Rob Johnson on the Fiscal Cliff
Dec 30, 2012
What it will mean for the U. S. economy to go over the “fiscal cliff.”?
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Article
2012: A Year in Review
Dec 21, 2012
INET researchers have continued their innovative work and are finding larger platforms and eager audiences for it.
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News
The Future of Economics: Bruce Caldwell on History and the Dismal Science
Dec 10, 2012
Your average economics textbook presents the neat image of a discipline with many useful conceptual paradigms for viewing the world. But it almost never gives any sense of how these ideas developed.
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Article
Waste, waste, waste
Dec 9, 2012
Economics is very theoretically comfortable with what may be termed `Keynesian’ waste.
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Article
“Choice Under Uncertainty”: A Misnomer
Dec 7, 2012
The Risk Society
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News
Saving Economics from the Economists
Dec 7, 2012
The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate.
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News
FT Names INET Co-founder Janeway's Book One of the Best of 2012
Dec 3, 2012
Doing Capitalism in the Innovative Economy
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Working Paper
Grantee paperTime Series Forecasting: Model Evaluation and Selection Using Nonparametric Risk Bounds
Nov 2012
We derive generalization error bounds — bounds on the expected inaccuracy of the predictions — for traditional time series forecasting models.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperConventions and the European Periphery
Nov 2012
The European periphery is qualitatively dierent from the core.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperModeling Moments of Crisis: The Case of Ireland
Nov 2012
Ireland has experienced a series of interlocking banking, fiscal, unemployment and political crises since 2007.
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News
Big business has corrupted economics
Nov 26, 2012
You know the country is in a financial mess when even establishment figures such as Rachel Lomax are calling for revolutionary thinking
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Article
The Theory of the Firm: Language, Model and Reality
Nov 18, 2012
In a previous post we queried whether the theory of the consumer as developed in the first three chapters of Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green (and indeed other comparable texts) provides anything by way of content beyond what is implied by the abstract description of consumers as agents who are maximizing something. [We did not discuss chapter four, on aggregation of demand, to which we may return later]. As we noted then, a comparable point can be made about the theory of the firm.
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News
INET Hiring Postdoctoral Fellows
Nov 18, 2012
The Institute for New Economic Thinking has openings for 2-4 Postdoctoral Fellows in New York City.
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Video
Human Capital in the Industrial Revolution
Nov 13, 2012
Did the industrial revolution increase the relative demand for skilled labor, or decrease it?
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Video
How Expectations Interact to Create Bubbles
Nov 5, 2012
How do economists make their models work? By assuming that investors have rational expectations and that every market participant is alike. However, things quickly get messy once economists start to acknowledge that people are different, interact with each other, and change heuristic forecasting strategies based on recent performance.
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Article
Blending the Economy and Science
Nov 5, 2012
For one more time traveling closer to home – Mainz! It’s been the annual meeting of the German Society of the History of Science (the kind of academic club one has to be nominated for membership).
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Article
Pleasure, Happiness and Fulfillment: The Trouble With Utility
Nov 3, 2012
For nineteenthth century figures such as Bentham and Jevons, the concept of utility was associated with satisfaction or pleasure experienced.
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Article
To teach or not to teach economics with The Wire?
Nov 1, 2012
So, my new students’ training is essentially about understanding urban “territories” and “societies” through fieldwork. And my contribution is, supposedly, to highlight the economic dimension of all this.
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Article
What should every non-econ student know about economics?
Oct 30, 2012
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.
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Article
OMT: Slouching toward Eurobills?
Oct 30, 2012
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.
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Working Paper
Grantee paperPoisoning the Well, or How Economic Theory Damages Moral Imagination
Oct 2012
Contemporary mainstream economics has widely “poisoned the well” from which people get their ideas about the relationship between economics and ethics.
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Article
Rigor Mortis?
Oct 24, 2012
Mathematics and the ‘Whiz Kids’
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Article
Krugman and Stiglitz: Crazy Austerity Policies Inflict Untold Damage on Economy
Oct 24, 2012
Two Nobel laureates, an election, and a shaky economy. The message? We can do a whole lot better.
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Video
A Conversation on the Economy
Oct 24, 2012
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.
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Article
Liquidity, Down the Drain
Oct 17, 2012
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.
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Video
The Corn Laws: Seeing through the Eyes of Ricardo and Malthus
Oct 15, 2012
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.
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News
Soros Honored by National Association for Business Economics for Role in Founding INET
Oct 15, 2012
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.