Economic Malpractice

Via Mark Thoma, Maxine Udall argues that, “If economists were physicians, we would be sued for malpractice.”
Economics, mathematized and divorced from moral philosophy, was effectively neutered after WW II, at the point when its relevance to “serious economic argument” might have been established and developed. The outcome was perfectly aligned with market forces that would [...]

Read Full Post »

Speaking Truth to Power: ECOP Issues at Board Meeting

Students at Notre Dame managed to put the dissolution of ECOP high on the agenda at the Board of Trustees meeting yesterday. Student government representatives placed this issue second on their agenda, after the GLBT issues I’ve blogged about before. Here’s The Observer’s report:
 Students are concerned by College of Arts and Letters Dean John McGreevy’s [...]

Read Full Post »

Keynes v. Hayek, Full Video

A while back, I posted a Newshour clip about the making of a Keynes/Hayek rap video. The full video has been released, and it is awesome- high production value and high comedy. Keynes’ biographer Lord Skidelsky says of it, “Absolutely fair and brilliantly rhymed…It’s not a complete account of Keynes but it seems to be [...]

Read Full Post »

The Illusion of Conversation

The sum of conversations, email exchanges, meetings, and everything else that has been recounted to me leaves me with one conclusion: Dean McGreevy does not truly value an “economics conversation.” This conclusion comes in spite of the fact that both publicly and privately, McGreevy’s line for several months has been to express his desire to [...]

Read Full Post »

ECOP Still Set to Be Dissolved

The front page of today’s Observer reaffirms Dean McGreevy’s decision to close ECOP (which, for the record, is not a mere “branch” of the economics department). The university’s academic council will discuss his recommendation on February 25th. First, the nuts and bolts:
The Department of Economics and Policy Studies will likely be dissolved by the beginning [...]

Read Full Post »

Off Topic: Homophobia Still a Huge Issue at Notre Dame

(Updates follow at the bottom)
One of the giant elephants in the room at Notre Dame is that for a campus that espouses social justice and equality, it has not made much progress on creating a sexual orientation-neutral culture on campus. In many ways, it has directly stifled it, by rejecting non-discrimination language intended to welcome [...]

Read Full Post »

‘Unperson’ Economists

Via Crooked Timber (h/t Thoma),  James Galbraith has an article (pdf) for the NEA Higher Education Journal in which he takes on mainstream economics as a whole. First, he points to a quote from Krugman’s much cited NYT Mag piece from September:
Of course, there were exceptions to these trends: a few economists challenged the assumption ofrational [...]

Read Full Post »

A Letter to the Dean Expressing Concerns with His Economics Leadership

In light of the Dean of Arts and Letters’ recommendation to the Academic Council to close ECOP, I have sent the following letter to him and the members of the Academic Council.
Dear Dean McGreevy,
I was saddened when I learned of your decision to recommend the closure of the Department of Economics and Policy Studies to [...]

Read Full Post »

Hike ND

With all of the talk about the future of the ND football program and coach around campus and in the New York Times (here and here), I thought it might be time to take another look at the economics of the program.
A recent Scholastic article by Marques Camp looked at “The big business of college [...]

Read Full Post »

Paradigm Shifts? Sudden Realizations?

There’s a great post on Washington’s Blog about Tuesday’s WSJ article about paradigm shifts in economics.
But the Journal makes it sound like the policy-makers and economists who deployed faulty models were innocently ignorant of any larger truths:
The models “were not able to draw up the red flags,” says Tim Besley, a professor at the London [...]

Read Full Post »