Economics Profession

Neoclassical economics has abolished the role of psychology in decision making by assuming that all individuals are rational optimizers with rational expectations about future events.

What is the purpose of economics?

INET researchers have continued their innovative work and are finding larger platforms and eager audiences for it.

Economics is very theoretically comfortable with what may be termed `Keynesian’ waste.

Two Nobel laureates, an election, and a shaky economy. The message? We can do a whole lot better.

What makes a good model?

Can economics be morally centered? And perhaps more importantly, should it be?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.