Meat and potato pies and the Nobel Prize in economics
Tragedy struck at a mid-week game played during the holiday season in Football League Division Two. The pies ran out in the home supporters’ bar. The incident may seem trivial to those not involved. Yet it illustrates some important themes in economics, which have even gained their inventors the Nobel Prize. It turns out that […]
Why teachers are just like bankers
The current highly emotional debate about GCSE grades is not very enlightening. But what has happened tells us a lot about how incentives matter, how they affect outcomes. And at the same time, it shows that unless a proper set of social norms is in place, incentives can have unanticipated, perverse effects. Bankers and teachers […]
Hard problems in economics
This is a summary of a presentation I gave in Zurich earlier in June to FuturICT,one ofthe candidate flagship European Union research projects, each worth 1 billion Euros. 1.Financial markets is a very hard problem, issues of agent heterogeneity, networks, learning, financial innovation, regulation – all these and more are important. Mainstream economics has largely […]
