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The Progressive Economics Forum

Risk, Uncertainty, and Black Swans

In 2009, in the midst of the financial and economic crises, Robert Skidelsky, the acclaimed three volume biographer of Keynes, added a fourth, Keynes: The Return of the Master. It is a radical and provocative assessment of economic theory since Keynes, insisting that at its core Keynes’ s Keynesianism was about uncertainty, about the irreducible [...]

Posted by Mel Watkins under economic crisis, history of economic thought.
April 7th, 2010
Comments: 18

Cyclonic Booms, Inevitable Busts, Staples to the Rescue…and Cities Where the Action Is

The American scholar Alfred Crosby writes of the neo-Europes, the offshoots of Europe, the products of the settling of the New World while unsettling those whose world it already was. James Belich, an historian – who writes like an economic historian – of New Zealand now teaching in Australia, has written a massive and splendid [...]

Posted by Mel Watkins under economic growth, economic history.
March 1st, 2010
Comments: 1

How Markets Fail

If you want to be reminded of the myriad of ways in which markets fail, you will welcome the new and timely book by John Cassidy titled simply How Markets Fail. Cassidy is not only an economist but a rare one who can write. Indeed, he writes so well that he is a regular contributor [...]

Posted by Mel Watkins under economic crisis, history of economic thought.
January 27th, 2010
Comments: 1

Do Economists Have a Country?

We do, but many of us, particularly of  the orthodox persuasion, do our best to hide it in our work. Where we live is “content” but the models we use, we insist, are universal. But that begs the question of where the models, which do not fall from the sky, come from. The answer is [...]

Posted by Mel Watkins under history of economic thought.
January 13th, 2010
Comments: 3

Paul A. Samuelson 1915-2009

Paul Samuelson was the greatest economic theorist of the 20th century. If we see Leon Walras, with his general equilibrium theory, as the Newton of economics – which I think Samuelson did – then Samuelson was its Einstein. In his Foundations of Economic Analysis in 1947, he laid out the fundamental mathematics that underlay the [...]

Posted by Mel Watkins under history of economic thought, international trade, liberals.
December 19th, 2009
Comments: 4