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I was just amused with two projects by Shaun Usher: to “gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos” in his blog Letters of Note, and to present interesting...

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In the Archives

Taking a quick break from my work in the Samuelson archives – so fascinating, believe me! – I can’t resist sharing the following, which I found in his correspondence files. Commenting on David...

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These 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...

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Shocks

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...

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A 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,...

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Was 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...

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Disdain 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...

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HES 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...

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Introducing 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...

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The 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...

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When 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...

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Paul 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...

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Paul 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...

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Who 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...

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Things worth reading: 2nd August 2011

Things we're reading today include ...read more...

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International 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...

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Single-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...

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Kansas 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...

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Chinese 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...

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Are 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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