Technology & Innovation

The Latin America Working Group and the Keynesian Economic Working Group of the Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) of the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) are hosting the workshop “Technology, Globalization and the Environment: Latin American Development in the XXI Century” to be held at the headquarters of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC) in Santiago de Chile on the 23-24 July 2018.

Young Scholars based in Latin America are invited to convene in Buenos Aires. The event serves to strengthen the Latin American network of new economic thinkers pursuing a new economic paradigm. Attendees will be able to enjoy several partner events during the same week.

The “dean of short sellers” says bitcoin is the last thing he’d want to own in the event of a catastrophe.

As in previous years, young scholars will come together in Trento during the annual Festival dell’Economia. This gathering will serve as the YSI Europe Convening for 2018. Attendees will have the opportunity to share their work with YSI members from across Europe, while also partaking in the Festival dell’Economia. 

Alberto Baccini’s presentation for INET’s panel on research evaluation at the G20 Global Solutions Summit in Berlin, May 2018.

Bill Janeway explains why “efficiency is the enemy of innovation,” and how venture capitalists and the state advance technological change

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Mariana Mazzucato argues that the idea that entrepreneurship is confined to the private sector is wrong.

In the face of  laissez-faire capitalism at home and resurgent nationalism across the globe, INET offers an innovative look at the causes of—and solutions for—the problems that ail a fissuring world economy.

Economist Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University, and his colleague, literary critic and Slavic studies scholar Saul Morson, argue that—contrary to popular belief—studying the humanities is the key to not getting outsourced.

The shocking—but illustrative—example of how an Italian government agency concocted statistics to evaluate scholarship, hid them from the public, and masqueraded them as science. It’s a growing phenomenon

Sen. Tammy Baldwin features arguments in questions to SEC nominees, pharmaceutical industry witness

We examine the hypothesis that the slowdown in productivity following the Great Recession was in significant part an endogenous response to the contraction in demand that induced the downturn.

A discussion with Steven M. Fazzari, INET Grantee and the Bert A. & Jeanette L. Lynch Distinguished Professor of Economics, Washington University.

The World Economic Roundtable seeks to help the business, investment, and policy communities understand ongoing changes in the world economy and to promote a discussion of ideas that can advance the goal of a widely shared global prosperity.

Austerity measures have battered the region and created instability throughout the Eurozone. Here’s one way out of the mess.

“The stories we tell ourselves about the world are a map of the world as we see it. And if we want to change the world, we have to change the story first.”

A discussion with Michael Grubb, INET Grantee and Professor of Energy and Climate Change at University College of London.

The Implications of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative for China and the World Economy

We want an economy that generates stable and equitable growth—or what I call “sustainable prosperity.” We want productivity growth that makes it possible for the population to have higher living standards over time. We want an equitable sharing of the gains from productivity growth among those whose work efforts and financial resources contribute to that growth. And we want sufficient job stability to enable workers to remain in productive employment for some four decades at work while providing them with enough savings to provide them with adequate incomes over some two decades of retirement.

Building symbiotic public-private partnerships

What Do Citations Actually Measure in Economics and How Should Economic Journals and Department Review Committees Use This Data? 

Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Spence and a global team of leading thinkers are calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

Growing income inequality is threatening the American middle class, and the middle class is vanishing before our eyes. We are still one country, but the stretch of incomes is fraying the unity of our nation.

The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism Guy Standing We are in the midst of a Global Transformation, analogous to Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation described in his seminal 1944 book. Whereas Polanyi’s Transformation was about constructing national market systems, today’s is about the painful construction of a global market system. To use Polanyi’s term, the ‘dis-embedded’ phase has been dominated by an ideology of market liberalisation, commodification and privatisation, orchestrated by financial interests, as in his model. The similarities also extend to today’s fundamental challenge, how to construct a ‘re-embedded’ phase, with new systems of regulation, distribution and social protection.

“Dual Economy” models were developed to explain growth in the developing world. Now they appear necessary to comprehend the high income trap that afflicts the world’s most developed economies.

INET gathered hundreds of new economic thinkers in Edinburgh to discuss the past, present, and future of the economics profession.

The Festival for New Economic Thinking is a collaborative initiative of several organizations, and aims to bring together those who seek to improve how economics is taught, studied and practiced. 

The Idea That Businesses Exist Solely to Enrich Shareholders Is Harmful Nonsense

The Theory of the Firm, Financial Flows, and Economic Performance

The YSI Economics of Innovation Working Group in partnership with the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology is hosting a YSI Conference on “Innovation, Institutions and Governance”.

Why we should worry about job quality, not quantity—or robot overlords

The prevailing stock market ideology enriches value extractors, not value creators

The YSI Latin America Working Group is hosting a workshop at the United Nations ECLAC Summer School on Latin American economies.

Price gouging in the US pharmaceutical drug industry goes back more than three decades.

The Young Scholars Initiative is hosting its regional convening for Latin America in Mexico City from 17-21 June. 

Conventional wisdom has it that the primary function of the stock market is to raise cash for companies for the purpose of investing in productive capabilities. The conventional wisdom is wrong.

The Young Scholars Initiative and its working groups will be hosting meetings and discussions in and around the 2017 Trento Festival of Economics. 

A look at America’s strange and dangerous approach to medicine, and how to fix it

How rationalization, marketization, and globalization characterize the U.S. economy during the past 50 years, and how the behavior of companies and fate of American workers have changed during this process.

Along the entire “innovation chain” — from research and development, to production and commercialization — government and private sectors have very different roles to play.

Despite dismissive comments by the U.S. Treasury Secretary, facing the challenge posed by robotics replacing human labor raises key public policy questions 

The decline in productivity growth has a longer history

Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies.

Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies. That is not to say that they don’t exist. They are created when employers or government agencies tamper with the natural functioning of the wage mechanism.

Taxing the use of robotics may or may not be the answer, but the question remains how to compensate for the growing inequality created by our changing economies

As part of our “Experts on Trial Series”, Antonella Palumbo argues for stripping away ‘scientific’ shibboleths that mask social and political choices

A reference guide to all Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) community presentations at the Eastern Economic Association’s (EEA) 2017 annual meeting

The practical question in Washington today is not whether regulations will go, but whether anything will replace them

Institute scholar Arjun Jayadev argues that while TPP is dead, its damaging legacy on intellectual property rights is likely to shape future bilateral trade agreements

Young Scholars from the YSI working groups on Innovation, Complexity Economics, Philosophy of Economics and Financial Stability will present their research at a one-day workshop following The Economics of Post-Factual Democracy conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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

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

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

A discussion on President-elect Trump’s economic agenda and its implications for the U.S. and world economies.

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

The business corporation is the central economic institution in a modern economy. A company’s senior executives, with the advice and support of the board of directors, are responsible for the allocation of corporate resources to investments in productive capabilities. Senior executives also advise the board on the extent to which, given the need to invest in productive capabilities, the company can afford to make cash distributions to shareholders. Motivating corporate resource-allocation decisions are the modes of remuneration that incentivize and reward the top executives of these companies. A sound analysis of the operation and performance of a modern economy requires an understanding of not only how much these executives are paid but also the ways in which the prevailing system of executive pay influences their decisions to allocate corporate resources.

Flows of goods and services, people and capital have overwhelmed the ability of political processes to accommodate them

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.

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

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

Vice President warns that corporate stock buybacks restrict America’s long-term prosperity, citing the research of Institute grantee William Lazonick who has long argued the same

Prof. Sanjeev Goyal explains his general theory of network formation based on individual incentives, and their economic implications

In June of this year, Swiss voters saw an initiative on their ballots calling for an “unconditional basic income” that would “allow the whole population to lead a decent life and participate in public life.” Put on the ballot by a petition drive after it was rejected in parliament, the initiative was rejected by 77 percent of Swiss voters, with 23 percent approving.

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

Is Market Capitalism simply an accident of certain factors that came together in the 19th and 20th centuries? Does the innovation of economics require a new economics of innovation? Is the study of economics deeply affected by the incentive structures faced by economists themselves, necessitating a study of the “economics of economics”?

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

Technology will ruin America if we don’t compensate for its impact, warns Andy Stern.

A response to Arjun Jayadev’s argument about the impact of automation on our work and life

Anxiety over human labor being replaced by cyborgs may be in vogue, but it’s overblown — machines may help us achieve healthier and more meaningful lives

Julia Cage warns that a media ravaged by market forces cannot serve democracy’s need for an informed citizenry.

Does the technology revolution require a new social policy?

Anyone watching the stock market has seen this: a post hits Twitter containing old news, and investors react as if it were new.

Industrial journalist Ken Jacobson and economist William Lazonick (both of the Academic-Industry Research Network), call for an end to stock market manipulation through buybacks.

Economic growth and rising prosperity does not happen at the moment of invention. Only an innovation policy aiming to maximise activities throughout the innovation cycle will succeed in capturing economic growth that enhance the welfare of all citizens.

For most economists and indeed for social scientists in general such a question induces shudders as already asking this seems wrong – aren’t governments more prone to failures than markets, and aren’t governments supposed to provide basic and stable institutions for markets to function?

Join us for a reception at the ASSA conference in San Francisco

Many Americans have expressed outrage over Pfizer’s plan, through its merger with Allergan, to move its tax home from the United States to Ireland. Now, in a New York Times op-ed, Carl Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider turned hedge fund activist, has joined the chorus. He labels the Pfizer-Allergan deal a “travesty,” blaming the U.S.’s “uncompetitive international tax system.”

Innovation is not a magic pill to solve the current afflictions that ail our 21st century economy.

Why are we paying for corporate behavior that crushes innovation, cheats taxpayers, cost jobs, and heightens inequality?

How much does the standard theory of externalities and public goods really say?

Will environmental limits, including limits on the climate system, slow or even halt economic growth? If not, how will the nature of economic growth have to shift?

By integrating the history of industrial development in Britain and the United States with the ideas of leading economic thinkers, this essay demonstrates the absurdity of perfect competition as the ideal of economic efficiency.

Public funding behind the technology is the secret ingredient.

Adair Turner discusses his new book, Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance.

John Kay shares findings from his new book, Other People’s Money, and his insights on changing the financial sector.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has awarded $2 million in grants to fund 21 different projects as part of the latest round of its research grant program.

America’s economic system has failed by not raising living standards for most.

Janine Wedel charts the fast–evolving system of power and influence. Who is accountable? What are the remedies available to the average citizen?

Margaret Heffernan on her latest book, A Bigger Prize: Why Competition Isn’t Everything And How We Do Better

People adopt diverse measures to protect from contagion. I propose a taxonomy of protection technologies, and present a model to study the implications of the technology on the prevalence of infections and on welfare at different levels of exposure.

The adoption and diffusion of inputs in the production network is at the heart of technological progress. What determines which inputs are initially considered and eventually adopted by innovators? We examine the evolution of input linkages from a network perspective, starting from a stylized model of network formation.

Here we are, some 7 years after the Great Financial Crisis, and not one senior banking executive has gone to jail.

In much of Europe, the social rights and social protections won in the first post-war decades, by labour movements in particular, have subsequently been seriously eroded, and are further threatened by neoliberal austerity.

We discuss recent work on bounded rationality and learning in relation to Soros’ principle of reflexivity and stress the empirical importance of non-rational, almost self-fulfilling equilibria in positive feedback systems.

“Because many interests come into play in the financing of an election campaign and then they ask you to pay back. So the election campaign should be independent from anyone who may finance it.” - Pope Francis