‘If we want a high-growth society with broadly shared prosperity, and if we want to avoid dislocations like the one we have just gone through, we need to change our theory of action foundationally. We need to stop thinking about the economy as a perfect, self-correcting machine and start thinking of it as a garden.’-Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer
Photo:amazon.com
‘Complexity Economics Shows Us Why Laissez-Faire Economics Always Fails’
By Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer Via Evonomics
‘Markets are a type of ecosystem that is complex, adaptive, and subject to the same evolutionary forces as nature.’
‘During 2007 and 2008, giant financial institutions were obliterated, the net worth of most Americans collapsed, and most of the world’s economies were brought to their knees.
At the same time, this has been an era of radical economic inequality, at levels not seen since 1929. Over the last three decades, an unprecedented consolidation and concentration of earning power and wealth has made the top 1 percent of Americans immensely richer while middleclass Americans have been increasingly impoverished.
To most Americans and certainly most economists and policymakers, these two phenomena seem unrelated. In fact, traditional economic theory and contemporary American economic policy does not seem to admit the possibility that they are connected in any way.
And yet they are—deeply. We aim to show that a modern understanding of economies as complex, adaptive, interconnected systems forces us to conclude that radical inequality and radical economic dislocation are causally linked: one brings and amplifies the other.
If we want a high-growth society with broadly shared prosperity, and if we want to avoid dislocations like the one we have just gone through, we need to change our theory of action foundationally. We need to stop thinking about the economy as a perfect, self-correcting machine and start thinking of it as a garden.’... Continue to read
Future Economists Hard at Work, Learning the Most Important Lessons
Photo:wastetoenergysystems.com
The Shaming of Economics Education
Calling all academic economists: What are you teaching your students?
Why Economics, Economists and Economy Fail?
Economics and Economists Engulfed By Crises: What Do We Tell the Students?
Economics, Globalisation and the Common Good: A Lecture at London School of Economics
My Economics and Business Educators’ Oath: My Promise to My Students
A New Nobel Prize: Economics in the Interest of the Common Good