Lessons for economists from the crisis

Larry Elliot has a superb piece in today’s Guardian on the challenges facing the economics profession in the fallout from the global economic crisis. He flags up a new book by David Smith “The Age of Instability: The Global Financial Crisis and What Comes Next ” which is now available through Amazon and will be a great read for ambitious AS and A2 students. And he flags up the first major meeting of the George Soros funded Institute for New Economic Thinking which is meeting appropriately enough in Cambridge. Reading through the agenda for the conference it looks like a gold mine of top quality speakers and sessions - sadly by private invitation only!

The director of the Soros-funded Institute is quoted as saying

“Too much of modern economic theory relied on sophisticated mathematical models to predict market behaviour. A broader, interdisciplinary approach to economics, taking in history, psychology, natural science — to deal with issues such as climate change — and even literature was now needed”

Larry Elliot argues in his piece that

“There is no need to reinvent the wheel. It’s more important to strip away the layers of complexity that gave big-picture economics a spurious and dangerous exactitude in advance of the crisis. The big lesson in economics from Keynes is that we know less than we think we do, and that there is a vast difference between the output of economic models and the actual behaviour of individuals.”

Read: Rescuing economics from its own crisis

The Times reports that George Soros is to create a new economics institute at Oxford University.