Landon Thomas compares the current predicament of the euro area to the predictions made before the single currency was launched in this article.
Stephen Kinsella pointed me to this site: the NSF in the US has requested ‘white papers’ on the future of economic research – the current list of contributions is available here.
Simon Head writes on the “The Grim Threat to British Universities” in the NYRB: here.
9 replies on “Reading List”
One more for the reading roundup;
Rebuilding the Greek economy will require creative interaction with the underlying realities of Greek society: the family, the small business, the habits of rentocracy and of low-trust opportunism. (This article was first published in Greek in the Athens Review of Books, June 2010)
http://www.opendemocracy.net/aristos-doxiadis/owners-rentiers-opportunists?
Obviously I’m biased but I find the interest in institutional economics, microeconomics, market design and international public goods as auguring well for the future.
Another suggestion :
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/23/how-can-economy-recover/
” What is rarely recognized is that even if the US can emerge from a weak economy within a few years, the economic foundation that existed before the cataclysm of 2007 and 2008 may not be adequate to restore the widely shared prosperity the US needs. For more than three decades, economic growth had been largely dependent on rapidly rising levels of debt and on two major speculative bubbles, first in high technology and dot-com stocks in the late 1990s, then in housing in the 2000s. What will now replace them? ”
“If we presume that there will be an economic recovery, almost all of the projected deficit through 2020 will be the result of three factors: the recession, the tax cuts of the early 2000s under George W. Bush, and the hundreds of billions of dollars of war spending.” Not Medicare !
The NYRB – or more accurately, the left-wing academic who has a selfish interest as all professionals do in minimising the accountability of his performance to those who fund him – provides no alternative to measurement of performance, except of course for the unspoken possibility of privatisation (in which case he would need a strategy to fund the universities, which seems quite unlikely to work on political economy grounds, given the recent riots).
The presumption running through the article is that academics spending time on reporting their work is always wasteful, but academics spending time doing whatever else they fancy with state money is productive. This will not work now that governments live in the fiscal real world for the first time since the 1940s.
“The Grim Threat to British Universities”
Bit of an odd title since he seems to be warning about something he points out has been going on since the eighties in “Oxford, Cambridge, London, Durham and beyond”. The fact he picks out those names suggests he is particularly aghast at the way the poshest of institutions have been included.
Actually got bored for above reasons and didn’t bother reading to the end. A less than compulsive read imo.
@grumpy
agreed!
Boring article.
He made Thatchers point about state funded academics for her
Your average newspaper seller on the Finglas Road would written a better and more to the point article.
couldn’t finish it either;)
The possibility that a system of political beliefs, habits and practices might prevent a recovery, a return to growth, has anyone written about that?
Yes Alchemist most days, and by a bloke who is a good written communicator. Trawl the archives.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
@ The Alchemist:
Try Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (scholarly text). J K Galbraith is also good.
@ All: Check out the Charts-only entry on theOilDrum.com.
BpW