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Business Daily: Future of economics

19/11/2009

Future of economics

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Future of economics

The financial crisis has shown up some pretty big holes in the economics being taught around the world. What needs to change for economists to find their way back to the real world ?

In the wake of the financial crisis, it’s been said that most of the macroeconomics of the past thirty years has turned out to be spectacularly useless at best and harmful at worst. And it wasn’t an idle basher of the dismal science who said that – it was the Nobel prize winning economist, Paul Krugman. 

So why economics? Why now? Somehow, somewhere, large parts of the profession seem to have lost their way or at least lost their connection to the world as it is. So what does it needs to find its way back.

The programme speaks to Charlie Bean who has been on the frontline in the past two years first as Chief Economist and now as a Deputy Governor at the Bank of England. 

And Lord Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes official biographer, who has spent a lot of his life studying the crucial debates within economics in the 1920s and 1930s. In his new book: Keynes, the Return of the Master he argues that the Keynes is as relevant today as it was then. 

Professor Richard Thaler of Chicago, and co-author of Nudge, is one of the best-known behavioural economists.

Professor Myron Scholes who won the Nobel prize for being one of the first to establish a way of pricing financial derivatives. 

Michael Sandel, a Professor in Political Philosophy at Harvard and author of a new book, Justice. He thinks the profession ought to go back to its roots to a time when economists were much more concerned with the route to a good society, not just an efficient one.

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