Professor of Political Economy and ESRC Professorial Fellow, University of Warwick
The 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.
The 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.
Recent criticisms of the mathiness of many economists has raised the question within the blogosphere of whether a fundamental fault-line has now punctured economics orthodoxy
Business executives will continue to tell us how to cast our votes in May’s general election, but, before being persuaded, check the evidence on both sides of the argument
Recent research suggests that such policies constitute hand-outs, rather than effective means to shape firms’ investment decisions
The new era of high-frequency trading threatens our future prosperity
This year’s economics laureates reflect the narrow purview of the prize and the entrenchment of familiar but limited ways of thinking about economic life