During times of economic crises, the public policy response is to abandon basic economic thinking and engage in ‘emergency economic’ policies. We explore how the current financial crisis was in part caused by previous emergency economic measures. We then investigate the theoretical...

Mainstream macroeconomic theory understands the economy as a phenomenon tractable by analysis adequately enough to be manageable by macroeconomic policy guided by this analysis. We explore why this epistemological approach of the economy has remained dominant in mainstream economics despite...

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households' expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations...

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households' expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations...

n the midst of the current financial crisis the economics profession has seen a monumental resurrection of Keynesian ideas. The debate, which Keynes started back in the 1930s, is being picked up again, not where it left off, but in exactly the same place it started. While Keynesian theories were...

Liberalism correctly understood is little more than the persistent and consistent applications of the principles of economics of the affairs of men be they domestic or international. These include mutually beneficial exchange, the absence of political privilege, and toleration. The institutional...

In sequence, we discuss the claims for state intervention that derive from our moral sense of justice, the arguments for state intervention based on prisoners' dilemmas and the need for collective action, and the case for state intervention that follows from the broad claims of market failure....