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 Greg Inwood This is a contribution from Greg Inwood for the series commemorating the work of Stephen Clarkson who died in 2016. Greg Inwood is a Profesor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration, and a member of the Yeates School of Graduate Studies at Ryerson University.  He is the author of Understanding Canadian Public Administration and The Politics and Legacy of the Macdonald Royal Commission.  He is the recipient of the Donald Smiley Prize in 2006 for the best book...

from Dean Baker It is amazing how frequently we hear people asserting that the massive inequality we are now seeing in the United States is the result of an unfettered market. I realize that this is a convenient view for those who are on the upside of things, but it also happens to be nonsense. Today’s highlighted nonsense pusher is Amy Chua, who warns in a NYT column about the destructive path the United States is now on where an disaffected white population takes out its wrath on...

from Lars Syll For me, the study of asymmetric information was a very first step toward the realization of a dream. That dream was the development of a behavioral macroeconomics in the original spirit of Keynes’ General Theory. Macroeconomics would then no longer suffer from the ad hockery of the neoclassical synthesis, which had over-ridden the emphasis in The General Theory on the role of psychological and sociological factors, such as cognitive bias, reciprocity, fairness, herding, and...

from Lars Syll But these more recent writers like their predecessors were still dealing with a system in which the amount of the factors employed was given and the other relevant facts were known more or less for certain … At any given time facts and expectations were assumed to be given in a definite and calculable form … The calculus of probability, tho mention of it was kept in the background, was supposed to be capable of reducing uncertainty to the same calculable status as that of...

Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate: We should all take a lesson from the Stoneman-Douglas students 1. Give Donald Trump Precisely 5 Percent of Your Mental Energy They have no interest in talking to him or even about him. They have internalized the lesson that he is a symptom of the problem but unworthy of credit or blame. I suspect that if the rest of us ignored the president half as ably as they have, we’d all have vastly more emotional energy for the...

from Maria Alejandra Madi The current WEA Conference: Monetary Policy after the Global Crisis marks the tenth anniversary of the greatest recession after 1929-33. The aims of this conference include discussing key theoretical insights in order: To provide a framework for improving monetary policy practices. To review and advance knowledge on the recent financial crisis regarding the main challenges and prospects of central banking. To particularly survey and discuss the use of Divisia...

This paper argues neoliberalism is engaged in a war against the welfare state. At issue are competing views regarding the size of the welfare state and how it should be organized. In waging this war, neoliberalism seeks to politically discredit the traditional welfare state and change the economic structure so that the latter becomes unviable. [...]

Large drop from already historically depressed levels reverses year end spike, and inline with depressed mortgage applications: Highlights Sales of new homes slowed but not all the data in January’s new home sales report are negative. New home sales came in at a much lower-than-expected 593,000 annualized rate in January though, in offsets, the two prior months are revised a net 25,000 higher. And badly needed supply moved into the market, up a monthly 2.4 percent to 301,000...

This was published on the PRIME site on the 25th February, 2018. Britain is led today by deeply divided political parties. Our leaders have many policies, but no inspiring vision for Britain’s future – either within, or outside the EU. As President Roosevelt once famously said: “where there is no vision, the people perish”. The peoples of the European Union do have a vision – the pursuit of peace and stability across the continent on the basis of European values (including the...