History

The Institute joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in hosting its third-annual plenary conference in Berlin from April 12-15, 2012.

In modern economies, individuals and companies engage in innovative activities, discovering new ways to use existing physical and human capital, and new technologies in which to invest. The institutional and broader social context within which these activities take place also changes in novel ways.

With my remarks today on financial markets and the financial crisis, I do not make any claims to originality. Rather, they are intended as a reminder of certain circumstances that are already familiar to us, in one form or another.

The global economy is in turmoil. Societies are unstable and not anchored by faith in the system or social order.

The economics profession stands on the fragile foundation of presuppositions adopted by professional agreement rather than as a result of empirical observation.

Dinner has already rolled around on what has been a quick day.

Just wanted to let you all know that amongst the distinguished, distinguishable and disturbing people at the INET conference we have inserted ourselves in the middle to do some interviews, attend talks and blog about what is going on.

In science, empirical disciplines such as physics, chemistry, history, and parts of sociology and political science, reason from facts.

Having just started Findlay and O’Rourke’s mammoth history of world trade in the second millenia, I have been struck by a strange incongruity

Yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer (or UK ‘finance minister’) gave his annual budget speech where UK fiscal policy is set for the coming years.

In his notorious “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong” NYT article in 2009, Paul Krugman relied on the freshwater/saltwater distinction to explain that the economists’ inability to predict and solve the current economics crisis was due to the fact that MIT/Harvard economics lost their long dispute against their Chicagoan counterparts.