Many of the problems in the British public sector directly relate to the attempt to create a world fit for the central planner in which all tasks can be set down in a system of rules. The philosophy of 'empirical consequentialism' underpins this entire venture. This is the view that the...

This paper highlights the difficulties that policy-makers face when trying to predict economic activity.

The ideas of modern macroeconomics provided the intellectual justification of the economic policies of the last 10 to 15 years. It is these ideas which the financial crisis falsified. The dominant paradigm in macroeconomic theory over the past 30 years has been that of rational agents who form...

The rapid closure of pits during the 1980s in the UK is an example of an economic shock which is not only specific to a particular industry but also to local economic areas. In 1983, only 29 of the 459 local authority areas in the UK was coal mining more than 10% of total employment. Over the...

There is empirical evidence from a range of disciplines that as the connectivity of a network increases, we observe an increase in the average fitness of the system. But at the same time, there is an increase in the proportion of failure/extinction events which are extremely large. The...

There are two key stylised facts about the extinction patterns of firms. First, the probability of extinction is highest at the start of the firm"s existence, but soon becomes more or less invariant to the age of the firm. Second, the relationship between the size and frequency of firm...

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,...