Tag Archives: public policy

[unable to retrieve full-text content]More than half the world lives in cities, and a lot of those cities (especially those in the Americas) are plagued with homicides and crime. Americans often think this violence is an individual problem: greed, passions, feuds, and hot reactive thinking drive killers. That’s true to an extent. But this view overlooks something important: that, […] The post The terrible trade-off: Why less violent cities often means more powerful and organized...

What follows is a summary of what I see as the key advice, with links to other resources that go into more depth or do a better job than I can. It’s going to be most accurate for economics, political science, public policy & other professional schools This post is a continuous work in progress, and it is comes not only from my own experience but that of a huge number of colleagues and readers. It can benefit from your feedback too, so please email me if a you have something to add (or if...

I spoke first to Eric Rubin, a career diplomat since 1985 at the State Department, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, and currently president of the American Foreign Service Association. He is crystal clear that “you cannot speak publicly against government policy. If you want to do that, you must resign. It’s anti-democratic. It is inappropriate to believe you know better than the people’s elected representatives.” Rubin also believes that resignations rarely have any impact on policy....

Neo-classical economics doesn’t offer useful insights for disruption. EvonomicsHow Changing My Economic Model Made Me a Climate Change OptimistAnthony Patt | Professor of Climate Policy at ETH Zurich, the author of Transforming Energy: Solving Climate Change with Technology Policy (Cambridge Univ. Press 2015), and a Coordinating Lead Author for Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. First, the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy has a new Obama Scholarship, which will pay (full tuition plus, travel costs and living stipend) for professional policy folks from anywhere in the world to get a 1-year mid-career masters there. It’s open to people from all sectors working for the public good with 3-5 years of work experience and a strong track record. Please forward to colleagues and friends who...

More than a century ago, the effective operation of the public economy was a significant, active concern of economists. With the insurgence of market-centrism and rational choice economics, however, government was devalued, its role circumscribed and seen from a perspective of “market failure.” As Backhouse (2005) has shown, the transformation in economic thinking in the latter half of the 20th century led to a “radical shift” in worldview regarding the role of the state. The very idea of a...

I am surprised that Geoffrey Hodgson would make an elementary error in argument by taking an arbitrary definition as an absolute criterion. His argument actually says that those he is opposing are using the term "public good" in a way that contradicts current convention in the dominant faction of the economics profession. What if the definition is too narrow to fit the general case and is therefore only suitable for special case models? This is similar to the claim of...

Public non-market production makes up a quarter to a half or more of all economic activity among advanced democratic nation-states. Yet the public economy’s ability to function on behalf of the populace as a whole is seriously imperiled in many western democracies, and particularly jeopardized in the United States. The surging influence of mainstream economics has been a prime factor in the degradation of the public domain over the last several decades – a phenomenon that James Galbraith...

Professors who advise students on PhDs, and students thinking about a PhD: if you read this blog, there’s a good chance you should consider the PhD in public policy at UChicago Harris Public Policy. The Harris PhD has a cohort of about 10 students per year. It has traditionally been strong in several areas: applied microeconomics, political economy of democracies, energy/environment, health, and education. The core PhD curriculum combines traditional economics training (microeconomics,...

Professors who advise students on PhDs, and students thinking about a PhD: if you read this blog, there’s a good chance you should consider the PhD in public policy at UChicago Harris Public Policy. The Harris PhD has a cohort of about 10 students per year. It has traditionally been strong in several areas: applied microeconomics, political economy of democracies, energy/environment, health, and education. The core PhD curriculum combines traditional economics training...