History

In his contribution to our ongoing series “Experts on Trial”, Alessandro Roncaglia argues that viewing economists as princes or servants of power is inherently authoritarian. We should instead see the economist as a socially and politically engaged citizen

Mallaby’s research shows that Greenspan knew more about the looming perils than people realize.

Panic over the impact on  German savers of low interest rates and looming inflation neglects to mention that very few Germans are saving much

As part of our ongoing symposium “Experts on Trial”, Professor Sheila Dow argues that if voters have grown contemptuous of economists’ expertise, that’s because economics has been misrepresented as a technical subject separate from politics and moral judgments

Turner discusses The Economist’s Society the liquidity risks posed by Exchange Traded Funds.

Research by INET-affiliated scholars shows the US lags far behind its peers on inclusive growth, suggesting inequality is not an inevitable consequence of globalization and technology

Institute Governing Board member Anatole Kaletsky argues that the Trump Administration’s policies will boost inflation and spur interest-hikes as well as a stronger dollar more rapidly than many expect, but that the European Union’s economy is on the mend

Smick argues that distortions of capitalism have fed populist rebellion, and that reviving a capitalism that offers opportunity for average people to increase their earnings is an urgent priority if America’s political economy is to be stabilized.

A discussion on China’s economic management at the beginning of the Trump era featuring Leland R. Miller, Co-founder and CEO of the China Beige Book.

This study group aims to reflect on international economic growth, sustainable development and the evolution of economic thinking around capitalism and enterprise through the analysis of a selected multidisciplinary bibliography.

A Speaker Series for the Greater Philadelphia Region

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

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

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

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

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. 

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 

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

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 

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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. 

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

New approaches are being developed, but efforts are fragmented and need to be brought together if we hope to piece together a paradigm. 

William Darity, Jr. has a new key to unlocking the mystery of inequality: stratification economics.

Social safety nets don’t always need to come with a dark side

Institute for New Economic Thinking launches a far-reaching research effort into causes and potential remedies for the low-to-no-growth malaise afflicting many of the world’s leading economies

A conversation with Robert Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, former Managing Director for Soros Fund Management and former Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee.

The financial system no longer funds new ideas and projects — only about 15 percent of the money coming out of financial institutions goes into business investment; the rest is spent buying and selling existing financial instruments.

The media has failed ask basic questions about the economic thinking — and business record — of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, says Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, author of The Making of Donald Trump.

The main point of this paper is that loanable funds macroeconomic models with their “natural” interest rate don’t fit with modern institutions and data. Before getting into the numbers, it makes sense to describe the models and how to think about macroeconomics in the first place.

Past failures, present uncertainty, and a challenging political environment have vastly complicated the central bank’s task, says Institute President Rob Johnson

The idea that economics has recently gone through an empirical turn –that it went from theory to data– is all over the place. I argue that this transformation has been oversimplified and mischaracterized.

If additional education is not the solution to racial inequality, what is?

An award created as a concession to market-minded bankers needs to recognize the centrality of social-democratic policies to the wellbeing of industrialized economies

The Eurozone is (quietly) disintegrating as ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ countries continue on paths of economic divergence. That disintegration is reinforced by self-defeating policies shaped by a macroeconomic model that mimics and reinforces the divisions between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’

An exclusive conversation with Richard Batley, Head of Macroeconomics at Lombard Street Research.

China is drowning in it. The whole world has too much of it. History suggests: This won’t end well.

An Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper by William Lazonick and Matt Hopkins reveals that much reporting on executive pay relies on systems of measurement that underreport real compensation

Newspaper’s probe amplifies questions raised by our research into the impact of corporate donations onU.S. elections

There is much for U.S. authorities to learn from the European example of forcing corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, but more far-reaching oversight of executives’ allocation of resources is also required

Report to the Institute for New Economic Thinking on the statistical measurement and policy implications of the compensation of the highest- paid U.S. corporate executives

The US stands out as an outlier: the US spends far more on health than any other country, yet the life expectancy of the American population is not longer but actually shorter than in other countries that spend far less.

There is a mix of common-sense opinions, political prejudices, conventional business practice, and pragmatic rules of thumb, supported in an ad hoc, opportunistic way by bits and pieces of economic theory.

Using a unique dataset provided by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), we document a direct channel through which financial institutions contribute to the net worth of members of the U.S. Congress, particularly those sitting on the finance committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

How economists turned to the study of collective decision-making after World War II, faced many impossibilities, and lost interest after solving them

Oversights of two generations of social scientists have weakened democracy.

Focusing on what money really is – whether gold or state fiat – shifts attention away from what credit really is, which is to say away from the center of discontent.

Social scientists have stubbornly held that money and election outcomes are at most weakly linked. New research provides clear evidence to the contrary.

On George Akerlof’s “The Market for Lemons”

Evidence from Insider Trading in Banks

With the power of modern computing being harnessed into increasingly small and portable devices, what do digital platforms mean for the entrenched global economy?

Inflation, the euro crisis – for years there has been one worry hype after another. Yet fear frequently turns out to be wrong. We need a committee of wise men in charge of dealing with the real risks.

This paper considers the estimation problem in linear regression when endogeneity is present, that is, when explanatory variables are correlated with the random error, and also addresses the question of a priori testing for potential endogeneity.

One thing is now certain about the upcoming presidential election in the United States: the next president will not be a committed free trader.

It was during a year in residency at Tokyo’s Hitotsuabashi University in 1995 that Jim Crotty first “met” John Maynard Keynes.

Europe’s leaders must recognize that the EU is on the verge of collapse. Instead of blaming one another, they should pull together and adopt exceptional measures.

The EU is preparing to take a tough line with Britain, in order to deter other member states from following it out of the Union. But it is the neoliberal agenda that has prevailed for last four decades, benefiting only the top 1%, that is fueled voter anger on both sides of the Atlantic.

If Italy or the European Union have to step in to save banks, there’s no reason for them to have to do it for free

What we’re reading: As the shock of the UK referendum vote to leave the European Union continues to roil, a number of analysts see it as revealing dynamics of which all Western policymakers ought to be aware

The economic historian would have seen the British vote to leave the European Union as part of a larger drama of centralization versus pluralism

No, it’s not bureaucracy that is to blame - It’s the EU that has a problem, because urged by Germany it has pushed a kind of naive globalization, the outgrowths of which contribute to the upswing of dim-witted populists. Not only in the EU. Time for a new paradigm.