Economists' capture
Thomas Piketty, Chile's Political Chaos, and How to Change Capitalism for the Better: ProMarket’s Top Stories of 2019
As 2019 draws to a close, we look back at ProMarket’s most-read and most-widely shared stories of the past year.
Thomas Piketty’s long-anticipated follow-up to...
Uber’s “Academic Research” Program: How to Use Famous Economists to Spread Corporate Narratives
Uber's employees co-authored academic papers with brand name scholars that were then used to back the company's PR and lobbying strategy. Published in respected...
Political Economy, Blind Spots, and a Challenge to Academics
Anat Admati calls on economists and academics to engage with governance and political economy issues, scrutinize models before applying them to the real world,...
Uber and the Sherlock Holmes Principle: How Control of Data Can Lead to Biased Academic Research
How can we ensure that academic journals do not become an unintended instrument in the PR efforts of powerful firms? Luigi Zingales offers some...
Aaron Director and the Empirical Foundation for the Chicago Attitude on Antitrust
Empirical evidence, not just disembodied theory, was an important building block of Director’s view that competition could defeat concentration, writes Daniel Kuehn.
Editor's note: Aaron...
A Fair Amount of Freedom for Everyone: Aaron Director Did Have Ideals
David Henderson of the Hoover Institution defends the legacy of Aaron Director, the most enigmatic among the founders of the so-called "Chicago School." Director, argues...
How Powerful Ideas Can Shape Society: Aaron Director and the Triumph of Nihilism
The rise of giants like Amazon and Facebook proves the long-lasting influence of Director's approach. His intellectual and political legacy is the transition of...
Call for Papers: Academic Lobbying
Ahead of our fourth annual Theory of the Firm conference, we are soliciting papers dedicated to the topic of academic lobbying.
Three years ago,...
Thomas Piketty's New Book Brings Political Economy Back to Its Sources
In the same way that Capital in the Twenty-First Century transformed the way economists look at inequality, Piketty's new book Capital and Ideology will...
The Limits of Private Action: What the Past 40 Years Taught Us About the Perils of Unregulated Markets
The two big ideas that animated American public policy since the end of World War II, employer-sponsored social benefits and neoliberalism, are failures. We...
