Bruce Bartlett Ignores Inequality

Bruce Bartlett makes a lofty claim (h/t Mark Thoma): Fortunately for conservatives, the greatest free market economist of all time, Milton Friedman, found an explanation for the Great Depression that let capitalism off the hook. The fundamental problem, he said, was that the Federal Reserve foolishly allowed the money supply to shrink by a third [...]

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Soros’ Big Push

Newsweek (h/t Ezra Klein) reports that George Soros is going to pour $50 million into an economic think tank that will combat free market fundamentalism. The “Institute of New Economic Thinking” will use grants, symposia, and a journal to encourage a wider range of economic thought. On its face, this idea seems like a good [...]

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(Ig)Nobel Reactions

Geoff Hodgson has compiled some reactions (pdf) to the recent Nobel Prize in Economics for RWER. These reactions are from the web forum/message board Economics Job Market Rumors, which is read by grad students, post-docs, et al. in the PhD econ world. Comments on any web forum, especially anonymous, should be taken with a large [...]

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Midway: Message from the Gyre

Earlier this year Matt had a post about photographer Chris Jordan’s work examining the waste produced by consumerism (check it out here).  Well Chris Jordan is back with a new work titled, “Midway: Message from the Gyre.”  The photo blog world has been buzzing about this work for the past week (as well they should, [...]

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What I’ve Been Reading

Creative mental forces are lacking lately. Intellectual ones, not so much. In the last two weeks I’ve read one very good book and started another. The first, The Moral Measure of the Economy, is an excellent crash course in applied Catholic Social Teaching, written by Chuck Collins and Mary Wright. For those who are pressed [...]

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A Vision for Catholic Higher Education

I recently came across a document published by the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities in July of 2009 called “Catholic Higher Education and Catholic Social Teaching.” The document offers a vision statement for Catholic Social Teaching (CST) across the curriculum. What struck me was the paragraph on “The Economy” which echoed my concerns and hopes [...]

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Nobel Prize in Economics

The Nobel prize committee announced this morning that Elinor Ostrom and Olliver E. Williamson, two Americans, will share this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.  (The New York Times and The Washington Post report on it here and here, respectively).  Now, I’m not an economist, so I won’t try to analyze (or explain) the work [...]

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Unbiased Estimation of the Usefulness of ECOP

In a recent Scholastic article (written up here by Matt), Professor Nelson Mark from the Department of Economics and Econometrics claims that faculty from the Policy Studies department “haven’t done anything useful since they got their dissertations in the 60s and 70s. They’re out of date and not doing very much.” Just in case your [...]

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The Homeless Heterodox

The most recent edition of Notre Dame’s Scholastic magazine had an excellent article called “The Homeless Heterodox.” Unfortunately, they do not seem to have an electronic version that I can link to, so here are some highlights: Fifteen Notre Dame professors will become essentially homeless over the next two years as a result of the impending dissolution [...]

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Slim Thug Feels the Recession

Wyatt Cenac from the Daily Show explores the effects of the economic crisis on rappers and related industries in this video segment.

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