by Binyamin Appelbaum | Sep 4, 2017 | Business
New York- In the decade since the financial crisis, economic policy makers, professors and protesters have gathered in the US every August to argue about the best ways to return to faster economic growth. This year, they gave up. The formal agenda and corridor...
by Mark Buchanan | Aug 10, 2017 | Opinion
Many economists genuinely want to make their field more scientific — grounded in empirical evidence rather than in theory or, worse, ideology. Yet a recent article by four prominent academics demonstrates the extent to which ideology remains a problem. My...
by Noah Smith | Jun 5, 2017 | Opinion
Economists, to put it mildly, are not known for their communication skills. The typical economics paper is written in a formal, stilted style, laden with phrases like “in the following subsection” and “it has been shown that.” Jargon flies thick and fast, interspersed...
by Noah Smith | Apr 8, 2017 | Opinion
When people come up to me and declare that economists are charlatans, they usually mention how economists failed to predict the Great Recession. This is true. No mainstream macroeconomic model of the day managed to anticipate that the largest, longest economic...
by John Lanchester | Mar 3, 2017 | Business
There was an unusual degree of consensus among economists about what would happen if Britain voted for Brexit in the referendum on June 23 last year. The language used by the International Monetary Fund was typical: It expressed fears of an “abrupt reaction,” adding...
