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 [...]

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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 [...]

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The Conscience of a University

The October issue of Common Sense, one of the campus newspapers at Notre Dame, included an article by Professor Emeritus Peter Walshe entitled “The Conscience of a University: a matter of economics and perhaps much more.” The article originally appeared in the newspaper in 1996, but it is being republished because, according to the Editor’s [...]

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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 They’re out of date and not doing very much.”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 gut [...]

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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 of [...]

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Economics and Its Course Requirements

American Spectator (h/t Thoma) has an interview with Robert Skidlesky, author of Keynes: The Return of the Master. One passage sticks out:
JL: In closing your narrative, you make the unusual proposal that students of economics should be required to master different and complementary fields, such as history or political science, when pursuing economics doctorates. But [...]

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The Petition

Click here to sign the petition to save heterodoxy at Notre Dame.

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Ghilarducci on the Closing of ECOP

A former ECOP faculty member gives her two cents:
Economists need to be broader, more self-critical, deeply knowledgeable about economic institutions. This is why it’s dumbfounding that the University of Notre Dame created an economics department filled — by intent! — of only neoclassical economists and banned their Ph.D. economists who are policy-oriented and non-orthodox from [...]

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