politics, economy and employment & labour
Europeans, and particularly the European elite, find popular attitudes to science among many across the Atlantic both amusing and distressing. In Europe we do not have regular attempts to replace evolution with ‘intelligent design’ on school curriculums. Climate change denial is not mainstream politics in Europe as it is in the US (with the possible […]
Macroeconomic forecasts produced with macroeconomic models tend to be little better than intelligent guesswork. That is not an opinion – it is a fact. It is a fact because for decades many reputable and long standing model based forecasters have looked at their past errors, and that is what they find. It is also a […]
I was in a gathering of academics the other day, and we were discussing minimum wages. The debate moved on to increasing inequality, and the difficulty of doing anything about it. I said why not have a maximum wage? To say that the idea was greeted with incredulity would be an understatement. So you want […]
David Cameron has pledged that, if he wins the 2015 election, he will spend the next two years renegotiating the UK’s terms of membership, and then hold a referendum by the end of 2017. The Labour opposition has declined to match this pledge. The UK business community, particularly those involved in trade, is broadly against UK exit […]
Jonathan Portes and I have an article in Prospect, which is a short summary of our discussion paper on fiscal rules (see here or here). In this post I want to use that paper to make two observations on the interaction of politics and economics. Jonathan and I are frequently accused of being against fiscal […]
Athanasios Orphanides, leading academic macroeconomist and from 2007-12 Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus, does not hold back in a recent paper. Here is just one quote: “During the crisis, key decision makers exhibited neither political leadership nor political courage. Rather than work towards containing total losses, politics led governments to focus on shifting losses […]
I was at a gathering a year or so back in which sensible economists were thinking about the transition path for the Eurozone to full fiscal (and banking) union. They viewed recent events as confirming that monetary union alone was not tenable, and that fiscal union was the way forward. Many share that view. I remember asking […]
There are probably a number of reasons why bank leverage (the amount of lending banks do in proportion to their capital) increased rapidly in the 00s: reduced regulation, underestimation of systemic risk as a result of the Great Moderation, a search for yield when interest rates were low, simple greed. Bank profits rose, and so did the […]
The argument that current growth (since 2013 in the UK and maybe from 2014 in the Eurozone) vindicates austerity is ludicrous. Anyone who comes to the debate without existing baggage can see that developments in the UK and Eurozone have been entirely consistent with what academic critics of austerity have been saying. So rather than […]
Why does the economic policy pursued or proposed by the left in Europe often seem so pathetic? The clearest example of this is France. France is subject to the same fiscal straightjacket as other Eurozone countries, but when a left wing government was elected in April 2012, they proposed staying within this straightjacket by raising […]
Everyone has heard of neoliberalism, but not many outside Germany have heard of ordoliberalism. I’m hardly an expert on it either, and in particular I know very little about the particular thinkers involved and the many varieties of each concept. However as an economist it seems to me that ordoliberalism is much closer to economics […]
