An Actual Labor Economist Writes on Unions

When most people refer to labor economics as a subset of neoclassical economics, they are actually referring to econometrics applied (usually, but not always) to the labor market. I didn’t realize this when I signed up for Advanced Labor Economics my senior year in college. I enjoyed the class immensely, because it was well-taught and [...]

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Kick It Over

A campaign has started at Berkeley to attack neoclassical economics and its dominance in the discipline. The students’ manifesto begins, We the undersigned, make this accusation: that you, the teachers of neoclassical economics and the students that you graduate, have perpetuated a gigantic fraud upon the world. You claim to work in a pure science of [...]

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Rethinking Education and the Economic System

The economics discipline treats education as a black box. Human capital (a term derived to symbolize human thoughts as part of the production function) is generally proxied by simple variables like educational attainment. More forward thinking scholars will use test score achievement, and the cutting edge will use cognitive ability tests. The video below, though, [...]

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Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

David Ruccio regularly comments on inequality and its myriad effects on economics, politics, and society (most recently, here and here), and he maintains a page on unequal representations which is a collection of graphic representations of inequality. These efforts are especially important today, because Americans are horribly misinformed about who has money. [ht:cr] This chart is [...]

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Search Theory as a Distraction

David Ruccio hosts an excellent guest piece by Richard McIntyre and Michael Hilliard, which takes a balanced and heterodox look at the work that merited a Nobel Prize this week. First, their positive take on search theory: The idea that workers and jobs are heterogeneous and that it takes time and effort to match them is [...]

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Will the real Robinson Crusoe…

Today in microeconomics, we covered the classic model of the Robinson Crusoe economy. But when it came time for the professor to tell the story, they did not even know the title of the Defoe novel from which our dear friend Robinson emerged. It was a bit embarrassing when a student had to explain that [...]

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Adam Smith? Who’s He?

Bruce Caldwell elucidates the importance of studying the history of economic thought [ht:sf]. First, it is an important part of a liberal arts education in economics: When I did my graduate work in economics at UNC, the history of economic thought was one of the core classes that all students had to take. We read [...]

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Neoclassical Invasion

We have often expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of pluralism in economics, a discipline which is now dominated by neoclassical theory. But what should also be clear is that this is more than a trivial academic debate about economic theory. The dominance of neoclassical theory is more of a “cultural hegemony,” to use the term [...]

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Labor Unions and Happiness

There’s a fair amount of literature as to whether there is a causal relationship between labor union membership and higher wages, and the evidence is mixed. However, in a recent study (h/t In These Times), two political scientists from Notre Dame, Patrick Flavin and Benjamin Radcliff, and Alexander Pacek from Texas A&M, examine the relationship between [...]

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Blogging Tomorrow

It’s not uncommon for me to promise a future post on this blog that either never comes or comes later than expected. There are also tons of posts in my mental queue that I simply haven’t gotten around to writing. Procrastination is not a novel phenomenon, though, so I know I’m in no way unique. [...]

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