From First Things, Edmund Phelps on economic justice and the spirit of innovation. The killing fields of inequality: Goran Therborn on why inequality matters. From Too Much, a profile of Emmanuel Saez, the Berkeley economist who many now consider the world’s top authority on the incomes of the super rich; watch out Wall Street, here come the Dutch; have we missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to trim the wealthy down to democratic size?; and the Great Depression gave us the minimum wage — might we now see a “maximum wage”, thanks to the Great Recession? Misleading Indicators: Charles Wilber on how U.S. economists missed the Great Recession. The uselessness of economic forecasters: Charles Morris looks at the terrible track record of economic oracles, and the reasons why very few of them get it right. Gilles Saint‑Paul offers a defence of contemporary economics against those demanding forecasts of crises and complaining about the profession’s mathematical intensity. Robert Shiller on reinventing economics. Economics is not so much the queen of the social sciences but the servant, and needs to base itself on anthropology, psychology — and the sociology of ideologies. Historical events, finding a dusty old book or debates at the dinner table: anything can inspire a Nobel Laureate — so what makes an economist tick? "A new science of governance for a new age": Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, who study the way decisions are made outside the markets on which many other economists focus, are awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (and more and more and more and more).
