Reshaping economics
I'm linking to Gregory Clark's article not for the same reason that some people have - enjoyable though it is to poke fun at professors - but to examine his suggestion that economics as a discipline is being reshaped. There are a number of details which qualify only as interesting gossip - the suggestions on academic economists' salaries and the dismissal of the "not real" "Nobel" prize. But the substance of the article is that: the "mathematical contortions of academic economics" are useless nobody predicted the downturn economics has not advanced in 80 years; the terms of the bailout debate date back to the 1920s and 1930s I'm conflicted about the last point. Selfishly, I want to believe it because, if true, it opens up more space in the discipline for new research such as my own. But I don't want to be working in a intellectually moribund field; and I want to believe that the rich and interesting range of work done since 1940 is ac...