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I was just amused with two projects by Shaun Usher: to âgather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memosâ in his blog Letters of Note, and to present interesting...
View ArticleIn the Archives
Taking a quick break from my work in the Samuelson archives â so fascinating, believe me! â I canât resist sharing the following, which I found in his correspondence files. Commenting on David...
View ArticleThese Things Take Time
Last week, I spent a few days in the Dalton-Brand Research Room, at Duke University, skimming through the Samuelson papers. They make everybody excited there, and for good reasons. Samuelson was all...
View ArticleShocks
The financial and economic crises started by the fall of Lehman Borthers came as a big shock, a financial shock, an economic shock, a psychological shock, and a political shock among others. From the...
View ArticleA Cold Case
Some time ago, my colleague and dear friend (nevertheless!) Loïc Charles wrote on the previous version of the Playground, a very nice and intriguing post on Samuelson's introductory textbook,...
View ArticleWas Adam Smith a communist?
In his two-tome, 1400 page Dutch Leerboek der Staathuishoudkunde (Textbook of Economics), first published in 1884, Nicolaas Pierson (1839 - 1909) accuses the great Scotsman of being a communist – or...
View ArticleDisdain or paranoia for historians of economics?
The organizers of Duke's Summer Institute on the history of economics were so worried that students might be embarrassed to ask their supervisors for a letter of recommendation, or that the...
View ArticleHES 2011, Paul Samuelson and the Beatles
The 2011 Annual Meeting of the History of Economics Society (HES) took place in South Bend, Indiana, at Notre Dame University, under the auspices of Philip Mirowski, probably with fewer attendees than...
View ArticleIntroducing the Jazz economist
You would have thought that to be a "jazz economist" was a good thing. I first imagined a "cool cat" that would entrance the hearts and minds of the populace. Not so.read more...
View ArticleThe government and the market
Mention the government and the market and all academic reflection and civilized discussion dissolves into heated monologues. Politicians are an extreme case. read more...
View ArticleWhen the US last defaulted...
Two things seem to be taken for granted in the current debt-ceiling debate: 1. The parties will come to an agreement on the debt ceiling because 2. These United States have never defaulted and will not...
View ArticlePaul Samuelson, Women and the History of Economics (Part 1)
Paul Samuelson was notorious for many things, but also, like Marshall, for spending most of his academic life in the same institution. However, there were at least three occasions when others tried to...
View ArticlePaul Samuelson, Women and the History of Economics (Part 2)
As part of the tremendous promotion campaign for the 8th edition of his textbook Economics, Samuelson was devoted a feature in the New York Times (February 5, 1970, p. 41). In the article, Samuelson...
View ArticleWho does original research?
INET is all about thinking new things, and indeed academia is supposed to inspire great thoughts. So why are there so little original research in economics? I don't mean in total, but think of it as a...
View ArticleThings worth reading: 2nd August 2011
Things we're reading today include ...read more...
View ArticleInternational money, take 1
As a matter of accounting, if the U.S. as a whole buys from the rest of the world more than it sells to the rest of the world, then it must, on net, also be borrowing from the rest of the world. Perry...
View ArticleSingle-tranche open market operations: there's a bigger picture
We continue to learn about what the Fed did during the crisis. Bob Ivry of Bloomberg sifted through documents obtained through a FOIA request, and his report, released last week, offers some thorough...
View ArticleKansas City-style Financial Reform
Jazz, barbecue, and now Kansas City has also its own distinctive style of financial reform, put forward in a recent paper by Hoenig and Morris, respectively President and Vice President of the Kansas...
View ArticleChinese property: a money view
The Chinese property market may finally be boiling over; there are certainly enough signs that the bubble is ready to burst. I won't try to call the peak. What's more useful is to try to understand all...
View ArticleAre banks firms?
In the debate over financial reform, one of the major themes has been the need to protect the public purse from the cost of future bailouts by requiring too-big-to-fail banks to hold a larger buffer...
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