Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics, a judgement mostly based on his labor theory of value. But this column argues that Marx’s representation of the power relationship between capital and labor in the firm is an essential insight for understanding and improving modern capitalism. Indeed, this insight is incorporated into standard principal–agent models of labor and credit markets.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, talks about antitrust, data as labor, and why he thinks the free market system is not actually free. “The entire business community has been speaking with one voice in the common interest of capital as a class,” he says.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik explained where globalization went wrong, how trade agreements serve rent-seeking by politically well-connected firms, and why the only solution to the rise of political populism is an economic populism that reimagines the institutions of capitalism.
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Top5itis is a disease that currently affects the economics discipline. It refers to the obsession of the profession of academic economists with the so-called “top5″ journals.
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At this year’s annual ASSA meeting, Stigler Center Director Luigi Zingales delivered a lecture honoring Oliver Hart, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for economics. Read the full lecture.
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Chicago Booth’s Luigi Zingales and George Mason University’s Tyler Cowen discuss the market power wielded by digital platforms, and how to promote competition.
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While the World Bank scrambles to contain the Doing Business rankings firestorm, a new paper by Rabia Malik and Randall Stone traces a more insidious source of partiality in how the Bank does development work.
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This week in political economy.
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Harvard Business School is the largest business school in the world, but is it fulfilling its founding mission of educating businesspeople who “handle their current business problems in socially constructive ways”? Duff McDonald, author of the recent The Golden Passport, speaks to ProMarket about whether business schools should incorporate ethics into their teaching and how he went about writing a book about HBS despite being denied access to HBS faculty.
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In the inaugural episode of the new podcast from the Stigler Center and Chicago Booth Review, economists Kate Waldock and Luigi Zingales probe the dangers of marrying business power with government power—without once uttering the name Trump.
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Colleagues and protégés reminisce about the late George Stigler and his impact on the development of economic thought.
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In conversation with Stigler Center director Luigi Zingales, Tyler Cowen—one of the brains behind the world’s most popular economics blog, Marginal Revolution—argues that a spirit of self-protection is behind America’s lackluster past growth and its tepid ambitions for the future.
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