Ergodicity Economics

"Britain has no leverage, Britain is desperate … it needs an agreement very soon. When you have a desperate partner, that’s when you strike the hardest bargain.” So warned former US treasury secretary Larry Summers...

People keep complaining about “income inequality” and writing books about how grindingly difficult it is for an alarmingly large number of Americans to get by...

A rentier economy (Christophers uses the term unapologetically) is driven by profits, which have increased in real terms as the poor have been denied social housing...

‘Performativity’ has, for example, been employed by the French economic sociologist Michel Callon as a way of denoting the capacity of a mathematical model or other aspect of ‘economics’ to be more than a representation of some external reality.

John Maynard Keynes once remarked that ‘practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’

Since the end of 2015, Portugal has been the scene of an unusual political drama. After failing to win a majority in parliament, the country’s long-established centre-left machine rejected the offer of a ‘grand coalition’ with its conservative rival to implement the demands of Brussels and Frankfurt.

The progress of science is generally linear. As new research confirms or replaces existing theories, one generation builds upon the next. Economics, however...

In the face of rising social inequality, both the rich and the middle classes own fancy TVs and nice handbags.

I am not now nor have I ever been a Marxist, yet Karl Marx was one of my most important teachers.

Club for the retired sons of indulgent fathers, Rea Irvin, 1914 by Guy Standing The 20th century income distribution system has broken down irreparably. Recall the post-1945 consensus under which the shares of income going to capital and to labour were roughly stable, when workers and corporations shared the...

If hedge funds go up and down alongside the market, and all but the top performers don’t even beat the market, the rationale for investing in them vanishes.

Attacked and ridiculed, the leak of 243 pages of TTIP negotiations concerning climate, environment and public health prove that civil society organisations were right all along.

Taking from the rich to give to the poor has been, is and should be the way forward for an exploited majority against remote, unaccountable concentrations of extreme wealth and power.

Those who care to see know the real damage that austerity has had on people’s lives. From those needing care who now get so little, to those waiting longer for hospital treatment, and those whose homes might not have been flooded without the cuts from 2011.

Economists struggling to make sense of economic polarization are, increasingly, talking not about technology but about power.

When it comes to fiscal policy the politics of the right at the moment could be reasonably described as deficit fetishism. The policy of the centre left in Europe could also with some justification be described as growing appeasement towards deficit fetishism.

The imposition of German demands on Greece, without consideration for its democracy, sovereignty or interests, is one of those moments that changes everything.

At first sight the negotiations between Greece and the Troika seem to be simply a battle about resources: how much of the pie that is Greek national income their creditors should receive.