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The CORE Project is an online teaching tool and free, open-access textbook.  For example, in contrast to conventional economics, CORE assumes that individuals are pro-social and myopic, rather than selfish and far-sighted. Competition is imperfect, with winner-take-all characteristics, rather than perfect.  Power is ever-present in the form of principal-agent relationships in labor and credit markets, instead of being treated as either diffuse or exogenous.  The ideas dominant since the 1980s – variously called the Washington Consensus, market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism – originally gained traction because of the perceived failures of Keynesianism and excessive government regulation.  But they took on a life of their own and produced highly financialized, unequal, and unstable economies that were unequipped to cope with today’s most significant challenges: climate change, social inclusion, and disruptive new technologies. All of our previous policy paradigms – ...

When a 40-year-old economics professor at Harvard University named Dani Rodrik was preparing to publish his first book in 1997, he sent the manuscript to a fellow economist to ask for an endorsement.  The title of Rodrik’s book was Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, and it argued that without government policies to mitigate the downside of free trade, the result would be deep and corrosive social divisions.  “he said I was giving ammunition to the barbarians.” The “barbarians” were men like Pat Buchanan on the right and Richard Gephardt on the left We believed that globalization created so much prosperity around the world that the loss of jobs in places like Flint, Michigan, and High Point, North Carolina, was a small price to pay. 77 million people voted for the man who has said that “tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Which leads to the obvious question: What did those of us who believed in neoliberalism and globalization miss?  To put it another way, w...

The economic-policy conversation in the United States has been thoroughly transformed within the space of just a few years. In macroeconomic policy, debt and inflation fears have given way to a preference for over-stimulating the economy and downplaying the risks to price stability.  As for taxation, the tacit acquiescence in a global race to the bottom is out, and establishing a global minimum rate for multinational corporations is in.  Industrial policy, which could not even be mentioned in polite company until recently, is back with a vengeance. This time around, academic economists have been largely playing catch-up. Dani Rodrik Project Syndicate 10 September 2021 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economics-turned-upside-down-in-the-us-by-dani-rodrik-2021-09 T he right answer to any policy question in economics is, “It depends.”  Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the au...

Det kan vara så att det europeiska drama, som tidigare kallades för det grekiska dramat, är en förelöpare för än större frågeställningar. Edmund Conway har i Daily Telegraph 19 May 2010 hänvisat till "the policy trilemma". Pofessor Dani Rodrik vid Harvard University har en teori som enligt Conway kan sammanfattas så här: The rule of thumb here is as follows: of the three aims we have been striving towards in recent history – democracy, national sovereignty and global free trade – you cannot have any more than two at any one time. Want to run your country as an independent state, open to the whims and volatility of the free markets? The voters will punish you at the ballot box. Insist that your nation has full control of its own affairs? Then you have to jettison any plans to play a full part in the global economy. Want democracy and globalisation? Then you have to suborn your sovereignty. Har Rodrik rätt är det bekymmersamt. Läs mer om det här - En hel ...

The major future economic challenges, by Olivier Blanchard and Jean Tirole https://www.strategie.gouv.fr/english-articles/major-future-economic-challenges-olivier-blanchard-and-jean-tirole Inequality and the Macron Commission DANI RODRIK STEFANIE STANTCHEVA Procet Syndicate July 8, 2021 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/inequality-report-of-macron-commission-by-dani-rodrik-and-stefanie-stantcheva-2021-07    

The specter of inflation is once again stalking the world, after a long period of dormancy during which policymakers were more likely to be preoccupied by price deflation. Now, old debates have resurfaced on how best to restore price stability. Under current circumstances, then, policymakers in developed countries should not over-react to the spike in inflation. As the historian Adam Tooze has argued, transitory inflation calls for a restrained response, whether through regulation or monetary policy. Dani Rodrik Project Syndicate 11 January 2022 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/correct-policies-to-fight-inflation-depend-on-context-by-dani-rodrik-2022-01

As long as this decision is evaded, the EU will remain dysfunctional. Dani Rodrik, Project Syndicate 14 March 2017

This is one of the interesting revelations in Varoufakis’s fascinating account of his tenure as finance minister.  “You are probably the one [in the Eurogroup] who understands that the eurozone is unsustainable,” Varoufakis quotes Schäuble as telling him. “The eurozone is constructed wrongly. We should have a political union, there is no doubt about it.” But there is also an alternative, much less ambitious view, according to which neither fiscal nor political union is needed.  What needs to be done instead is to de-link private finance from public finance, insulating each from the malfeasance of the other. Dani Rodrik, Project Syndicate 11 December 2017