One of the founders of neoclassical economics in the late 19th century was the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. It might seem that the musings of a neoclassical economist over a century ago would have little in common with the concerns o...

When we deposit money in the bank, we usually expect to receive interest in return. But would it be better for the economy as a whole, if instead we had to pay to have our money looked after? The cost of keeping money, known as demurrage, has been a fe...

One of the founders of neoclassical economics in the late 19th century was the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. It might seem that the musings of a neoclassical economist over a century ago would have little in common with the concerns o...

In a 2009 New York Times article entitled How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? Paul Krugman wrote that “The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”   ...

The Canadian ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky once said, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” Businesses and societies try to perform a similar trick, through forecasting. We seem...

One of the greatest of economic myths is the animal known as rational economic man. This mythological beast is frequently described in introductory economics books, and is defined by certain striking characteristics.He is highly individualistic – he...

In early 2010, the world economy may finally be emerging from the deepest recession since the 1930s. The blame for the recession has been put on many things, including the US housing market, complex credit derivatives, risk models, banker bonuses, and so ...

As discussed in previous columns, financial crashes have similar statistical properties as earthquakes, craters on the moon, and many other natural phenomena, in that they follow what is known as a scale-free, power-law distribution. This means in effect ...

However, the two fields of fisheries and finance do share certain properties. Their overseers are both charged with the management of complex ecosystems, either of different ocean species, or of different investor species. They each have to deal with sudd...

Since Marshall wrote those words a century ago, however, there has been surprisingly little integration between economics and other life sciences. Instead economics has continued to model itself after physics. The General Equilibrium Models favoured by po...