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Excerpts from “Retrospect and Prospect,” the concluding remarks Bob Coats presented at (or maybe wrote after) the History of Economics conference held in 1972 at Bellagio to commemorate and reassess the 1870s “marginal revolution” (full proceedings here).

New economic thinking is creating change in Germany.

Robert Solow, “Notes on Coping.” In Szenberg ed. Eminent Economists: their Life Philosophy, 1992, p270

Monday marked the one-year anniversary of the start of the Occupy movement, and INET Executive Director Rob Johnson went on CNBC to discuss the significance of the milestone.

Yesterday, I had my first introductory economics seminar with my new students.

Would having more women in leadership have prevented the financial crisis?

Many public debates about climate change now focus on the economic “costs” of taking action.

While Europe faces the specter of overwhelming debt, another deficit lies at the heart of the inability to find a solution: a deficit of trust.

INET co-founder George Soros is calling on Germany to lead Europe out of its economic doldrums or get out of monetary union altogether.

I thought I was on to an inside reference when re-reading the General Theory when Keynes calls Marx, Edgeworth and others simply by name, but refers to “Professor Pigou” in several instances.

This work studies the interactions between income distribution and monetary and fiscal policies in terms of ensuing dynamics of macro variables (GDP growth, unemployment, etc.) on the grounds of an agent-based Keynesian model.

Mid August, with the Olympics over, Paralympics and Premiership starting (that’s Soccer for the American readership), it is well and truly the quiet period for most of academia.

When Felix Salmon looks at the global equities market he sees a world of free-for-all electronic warfare that likely would be more recognizable to Isaac Asimov than Milton Friedman.

In a recent interview, INET Advisory Board member and Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of EnglandAndy Haldane took aim at the economics profession.

This week Bernanke spoke to the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, and, as Bloomberg Businessweek notes, he was singing a different tune.

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

“You can’t get out of debt by adding more debt.”

How to explain the current recession facing the US and the world? Does so-called “austerian” logic provide the solution? Or is it doing more harm than good?

Where’s the next economic crisis?

Paul De Grauwe raises very important questions on the institutional structure of Europe and how it must be modified to fortify the euro zone.

In what sense are central banks really independent? From whom are they independent? For whom in society do they deliver?

How must the European institutional structure be modified to fortify the euro zone?

In Friday’s FT, former Morgan Stanley trader Douglas Keenan traces banks’ LIBOR manipulations back to 1991, when he observed, from the futures desk, LIBOR fixings come in at levels different from where he new the market to be.

If the meetings of European historians of economics are urbane and cosmopolitan, the meetings of American historians are, by contrast, frank and toilful.

The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) recently published the Inclusive Wealth Report 2012, in which the authors propose a measure of wealth based on the stock of capital present in a country, as opposed to the flow measure of GDP.

what role central bankers should play to bring the needed change>

Has the servant’s servant become the master’s master?

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

In support of a European Banking Union, Done Properly: A Manifesto by Economists in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

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.

A few days ago, I began researching on the history of a subfield of economics which was born in the sixties, then thrived and institutionalized itself in the early seventies.

[We are inaugurating something new in this blog: a jointly written post!]

How will climate change influence economic sustainability?

How representation of data can contribute to, or dispel the false certainty of statistical and econometric technique.

“We choose this stochastic structure for computational reasons. This reduces the dimension of the variables. With (such and such) alternative, the computational burden would have dramatically increased.”

Are we doomed to repeat the past? Even when we know better? Or do we not know better even when we should?

Stock flow consistent macroeconomic models suffer from the lack of a coherent estimation method due to the complicated nature of the modeling process.

The Great Recession seems to be a natural experiment for macroeconomics showing the inadequacy of the predominant theoretical framework — the New Neoclassical Synthesis — grounded on the DSGE model.

Background paper for a presentation to the Seattle University School of Law Berle IV Symposiun, “The Future of Financial/Securities Markets,” London June 14-15, 2012.

This paper tracks the development of sectoral saving and borrowing in the US economy over the past 50 years.

Revised text of a presentation at the Conference on Microfoundations for Modern Macroeconomics, Columbia University, November 2010. I would like to thank Amar Bhidé, Roman Frydman, and Andy Haldane for helpful comments, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking for research support.

John Kay’s thought-provoking essay The Map is Not the Territory: An Essay on the State of Economics argues that economists have been led astray by excessive reliance on formal models derived from assumptions that bear too little similarity to the world we live in.

A poem seems to be an almost perfect metaphor for the modern corporate world.

The University of Chicago is well-known for as the place where a famous group of economists, including Milton Friedman, Georges Stigler, Gary Becker, among others, developed a method for analyzing economic facts based on Marshallian price theory, a vision of the evolution of macroeconomic aggregates called monetarism, and an approach to individual liberties and the role of the state known as (neo)liberalism.

In a show of good faith between two rising economic powers, China and Brazil have agreed to a bilateral currency swap.

While German economic policy makers continue to cling to neoclassical economic approaches, an increasing number of prominent economic figures are starting to accept the failure of orthodox theories to address the current crisis and are expressing the need to rethink fundamental economic concepts.

What is the purpose of America’s universities today?

I always think of Adam Smith when I hear the term ‘division of labour’ - but I’m being cured of this by reading a bit more about Britains late 18th century in Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men.

One country poses an existential threat to Europe – and it is not Greece, Italy or Spain.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick is growing frustrated with the lack of urgency on the part of Europe’s leaders in responding to the financial crisis in the euro zone.

At the heart of the Eurocrisis lies a vicious circle where once there was a virtuous one.

Leijonhufvud has questioned the flawed fundamentals of economics. And he has explored the spread of contagion in undermining the web of contracts that are the basis for capitalism.

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.

Have you ever heard the old adage about the danger of allowing foxes to guard the henhouse? Apparently the New York Fed hasn’t.

Germany should not pay for the bankruptcy of Europe, at least according Hans-Werner Sinn, head of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.

“Spain is now heading down the same path that bankrupted Ireland,” INET grantee Stephen Kinsella of the University of Limerick and Mark Blyth of Brown University warn on the Harvard Business Review’s blog.

“Spain is now heading down the same path that bankrupted Ireland,” INET grantee Stephen Kinsella of the University of Limerick and Mark Blyth of Brown University warn on the Harvard Business Review’s blog.

What is the role of Germany in Europe?

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].”

Chicago School founder Frank H. Knight had some prescient observations in the early 20th century.

The refrain for some time now has been that the economy will decide the upcoming U.S. election. But Joe Stiglitz offers some much needed focus to this discussion.

Today the world lost one of its leading economic lights, as Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom passed away at the age of 78.

Last Friday, philosophers from the University of Leiden hosted the symposium ‘Between Science and History,’ in an attempt to figure out what the differences are between practicing scientists’ use of history and historians use of history.

“A chronic trend of this sort would indicate that the yuan was now overvalued versus the dollar,”

Since September 2011, the Swiss National Bank has held a floor of 1.20 francs per euro.

It’s crunch time in Europe.

Inequality isn’t just a problem for the 99%.

Ivan Moscati is one of the most exciting voices in the historiography of decision theory.

Steven Shapin is visiting the UK. For those unfamiliar with the history and sociology of science, he is one of the giants of the field.

FT Alphaville uses a Lord of the Rings metaphor to describe the state of global currencies.

Stephen Kinsella has some advice for economists: “Sometimes, all you need is a nutter in a balloon to change your perspective. And perspective is everything.”

If proof were needed of the maxim that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the economic crisis in Europe provides it

My attempt at a double riddle. “I find familiar faces only in unfamiliar places. Who am I? And whom are the faces?” The answer to the first is, I am an academic, to the second, my conference buddies.

Below is a revised version of a talk I gave at the New School University, at a conference to launch Lance Taylor’s latest book. The date of the event was April 28, 2011, more than a year ago, and the delay in revision was entirely my fault—overcommitment and pressing deadlines on many fronts. Sorry about that.

The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics

Will China correct this imbalance by allowing the RMB to appreciate? Or will it dump dollars onto forex markets?

INET Executive Director Robert Johnson delivered a keynote address at the OECD Forum in Paristoday.

Who does the economist serve: powerful interests or society?

Mathematician Michael Edesess has a dose of reality for economists.

What’s wrong with our economic recovery?

Attendees at the book party were treated to an assortment of wine, sushi, and intriguing conversation on the rooftop of Schiffrin’s parents’ Upper West Side apartment.

We investigate the effects of government spending on U.S. economic activity using a threshold version of a structural vector autoregressive model.

“While it’s incredibly difficult to get a regulatory reform passed, it’s far easier – and more profitable to politicians – to kill it.

Being the smartest guys in the room doesn’t prevent you from making bad decisions.

Here is a talk I gave recently at Wake Forest University.

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

Human beings aren’t mechanical. And mechanistic economic theories can’t account for uncertainty or political instability and individual creativity.

The topic of this session of the INET conference is a question: does the effectiveness of fiscal policy in stabilizing an economy depend on the underlying economic context in which the policy is implemented?

The paper deals with the mysterious persistence of the Chicago approach as the main analytical engine driving antitrust enforcement in the US.

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

The Washington Consensus is dead.

When Paul Krugman paints John Maynard Keynes as a pioneering critic of dominant free-market economics, he exaggerates wildly, both about the rigidity of orthodoxy and about the pioneering character of Keynes’ critique.

New economic thinking is no passing fad. The movement for new economic thinking is here to stay - with broad-based, worldwide support from undergraduate and graduate students as well as both young and established professors and Nobel laureates.

how economics students have begun to push back against the stale ideas that were proven wrong during the recent financial crisis.

I don’t seem to be able to fully grasp Mark Blaug’s distinction between a relativist and an absolutist approach to the history of economics – first introduced in Economic Theory in Retrospect (1962) – and that is a source of much frustration.

The Huffington Post spotlights the INET financial instability video, produced by Four Corners Media, accompanied by an extensive written introduction fromINET Executive Director Robert Johnson.

Like many economists, I have enjoyed Axel Leijonhufvud’s “Life among the Econ” and nodded appreciatively when he described the social classifications of the Econ as “Grads, Adults and Elders” and chuckled when the young grad tries to impress the elders of the ‘dept’ through adept ‘modl’ building; so when the man himself was holding a glass of champagne and chatting with me at the INET conference, I had to ask how he got that paper started.

Paper revised for the Institute’s Plenary Conference in Berlin

The text below is the comment I offered on Mr. Soros’ opening speech at INET’s Berlin Conference April 12, 2012. The text of Mr. Soros’ own speech is here. Video of the entire session is below—my bit starts at 55:00.

INET Berlin 2012 - back home again. On stage, it’s been a huge amount of claims, assertions, and arguments about what went wrong, about what exactly happened, about why this time was different, about what will certainly happen, and about what remains deeply uncertain, about what “we” shall do about it, about what “we” could do better.