Matthew Watson
Professor of Political Economy and ESRC Professorial Fellow, University of Warwick
Conservative Fantasies of ‘the Market’
Matthew Watson - 11 July 2019The UK Chancellor Philip Hammond recently declared (surprisingly for a Conservative party politician) that ‘the market’ is currently failing fairness tests in the distributional outcomes it is producing in the UK. Yet, his solution saw him quickly restored to partisan type, idealising textbook market institutions and setting as the future goal returning to the way market outcomes are “supposed to” operate.
Economic uncertainty and economics imperialism
Matthew Watson - 26 October 2017The question of why uncertainty does not feature more prominently as an economic ontology requires answers that are rooted in intellectual history. This post, the sixth in our series on uncertainty, searches for them by looking at how economic history has become increasingly colonised by economic theory, and economic theory by mathematics.