Arthur Okun - teacher at Yale in the 1950s, member and later Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors in the 1960s, and Fellow of the Brookings Institution throughout the 1970s - was one of the three or four most important macroeconomists of the past twenty years. He was perhaps...

For more than one decade, Hayek's theory of cultural evolution has been the object of a double controversy, with scientific and philosophical aspects. What is in discussion is nothing less than the existence of inner contradictions in the work of the Austrian Nobel prize winner. Apparently...

Paul Samuelson once noted that "Abba Lerner has been a great theoretical economist in a vintage epoch for theorists. This last third of a century he has poured out one brilliant paper after another-in micro theory and macro, in pure thought, and in the realms of policy." Lerner's colleagues at...

The present essay investigates F.A. Hayek’s epistemology and his methodology of sciences of complex phenomena for implications relevant to an explanation of Hayek’s own so- called “epistemic turn.” The thesis defended here is that Hayek’s dissatisfaction with his technical economics...

The world of economics is a complicated and messy place. Yet modern economic analysis rests on an attempt to represent the world by means of simple mathematical models. To what extent is this possible? How can such a program cope with the fact that economic outcomes are often driven by factors...

What did Keynes means by full employment? What did he mean by budgets deficits? and how did he propose to deal with the problem of what Alvin Hansen called 'secular stagnation'?

Government regulation is ubiquitous today in rich and middle-income countries--present in areas that range from workplace conditions to food processing to school curricula--although standard economic theories predict that it should be rather uncommon. In this book, Andrei Shleifer argues that...