ASSA 2022: part two – the heterodox

In this second post on the annual ASSA economics conference, I look at the papers and presentations made by radical and heterodox economists.  These presentations are mostly under the auspices of the Union of Radical Political Economics (URPE) sessions, but the Association of Evolutionary Economics also provided an umbrella for some sessions. The mainstream was

ASSA 2022: part one – the mainstream

The annual conference of the American Economics Association (ASSA 2022) took place last weekend.  This year it was a virtual conference, but there was still a myriad of presentations and sessions in the largest academic economics conference in the world, with many of the big hitters of mainstream economics on the webinars. I usually divide

Price controls: do they work?

Isabelle Weber is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of How China Escaped Shock Therapy. She recently wrote in the UK Guardian newspaper that price controls should be considered to deal with the inflation spike hitting many economies in the wake of the COVID crisis. Weber’s piece

Forecast for 2022

At the beginning of each year, I make an attempt to forecast what will happen in the world economy for the year ahead.  The point of making any forecast at all is often ridiculed.  After all, surely there are just too many factors to feed into any economic forecast to get even close to what

Top ten posts of 2021

I began this blog eleven years ago. Over those years, I have posted over 1000 times with over 4 million viewings. There are currently 6100 regular followers of the blog up from 5300 last year; and 11500 followers (up from 10500 last year) of the Michael Roberts Facebook site, which I started six years ago. 

Books of the year

This is not a review of the best books of the year, but a reminder of the books that I have reviewed during 2021.  In this second year of COVID, let’s start with Adam Tooze’s Shutdown.  Tooze is the liberal left’s current favourite historian.  And Tooze is the ultimate ‘historian of the moment’.  By that

WAPE 15

The 15th Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE) took place on 18-19 December.  It was held physically at the Shanghai International Studies University, China; but was complemented by virtual panels with a large number of Marxist economists from outside China participating.  There were around 200 papers presented on a range of subjects:

Chile: copper-bottomed?

The victory of former student leader and activist Gabriel Boric in Chile’s presidential election is the culmination of a sweeping change of mood and direction among Chilean voters.  In a 56% turnout, the highest since voting was made voluntary, 35-year old Boric took 56% of the vote compared to ultra-right Antonio Kast’s 44%.   Boric

The central bankers’ dilemma

“The inflation that we got was not at all the inflation that we were looking for,” US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell said in his press conference after the Fed’s monetary policy committee decided to accelerate the ‘tapering’ of its bond purchases to zero by March 2022 and suggested that it will start to hike

World inequality

The world has become more unequal in income and wealth in the last 40 years.  That’s according to the World Inequality Report 2022, available here.  Produced by the World Inequality Lab, run by Thomas Piketty and a group of over 100 analysts from around the world, the report has the most up-to-date and complete data on the