Many of us in Western Europe and America feel that our economies are far from just, though our views on justice differ somewhat. One band of economists, led for decades by the British economist Anthony Atkinson, sees the West as being in another Gilded Age of inequality in income and wealth.1 Adopting Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian […]
An evergreen joke among speakers at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos warns against making predictions. Whatever you say, the punchline goes, will be proven wrong. Read Here – BusinessWeek
This isn’t all the tutors’ fault: when you have to lecture to 400 students at once, it’s hard to find time and space to go off-piste. But the result is that economics students come out of exam halls and go off to government departments or the City with exactly the same toolkit that just five […]
When the stakes are high, it is no surprise that battling political opponents use whatever support they can garner from economists and other researchers. That is what happened when conservative American politicians and European Union officials latched on to the work of two Harvard professors – Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff – to justify their support of […]
It’s that time of year again: Experts of all kinds are coming out of the woodwork to offer up forecasts and predictions for the year ahead. It can be amusing, but this is not the most productive way to think about the future. Perhaps you’re familiar with Philip Tetlock’s landmark 2005 UC Berkeley study that looked at […]
It is time for economists to admit that they are stumped. Four years after being blindsided by Lehman Brothers’ collapse, the profession is still stumbling in the dark. Policymakers and pundits still make confident pronouncements, but the conclusions are radically different. The expert disagreements give away the truth: ignorance reigns. Read Here – Reuters
looking beyond borders 