In the 1990s and 2000s, unemployment was seen, both by academic labour market economists and policymakers, as a short-run disequilibrium phenomenon. Policy was aimed at increasing the 'flexibility' of the labour market, at removing obstacles to the workings of the market, which would ostensibly...

By scientific standards, the accuracy of short-term economic forecasts has been poor, and shows no sign of improving over time. We form a delay matrix of time-series data on the overall rate of growth of the economy, with lags spanning the period over which any regularity of behaviour is...

We provide empirical evidence that in a social network which evolves over time, it is possible to extract deep information about the system from limited observations. In this paper, we consider a simple piece of readily available evidence on access to financial services by individuals in the UK....

Qualitative evidence suggests that heresy within the medieval Church had many of the characteristics of a scale-free network. From the perspective of the Church, heresy can be seen as an infectious disease. The disease persisted for long periods of time, breaking out again even when the Church...

The Internet is known to have had a powerful impact on on-line retailer strategies in markets characterised by long-tail distribution of sales [C. Anderson, Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Hyperion, New York, 2006]. Such retailers can exploit the long tail of the...

Propongo una reforma radical y ramificada del plan de estudios. Aún se debería enseñar el modelo básico de comportamiento del agente de la economía tradicional, pues no es totalmente irrelevante para el mundo real. Pero solo debería ser una de las numerosas formas de comportamiento de los...

There is considerable scope for further privatisation, with the particular aim of sharply reducing public sector claims on national output. However, survey evidence indicates considerable opposition to further privatisations, particularly those taking the form of creating dividend-paying joint...

Economics as a discipline has considerable strengths. But the number of economics students has fallen substantially over a number of years. How can the tide be turned and the product made more attractive? Economics textbooks have become too dogmatic, as if many problems have been solved and...

"In 1949, Hayek attributed the dominant position of planning in the West to the role of intellectuals, by which he meant 'professional second-hand dealers in ideas' such as journalists and commentators. Later in the twentieth century, we saw a similar phenomenon: particular social ideas,...

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