Social Science Space

Alan B. Krueger, presently the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Princeton and formerly chairman of President Barack […]

The value in economics lies not in some magical ability to divine the future. Tell that to the policymakers who expect their fortunes told.

People tend to herd together, whether it’s following the crowd or determining what news to accept. UCL economist Michelle Baddeley has studied this behavior and discusses what she’s learned in this latest Social Science Bites podcast.

Political economist Mark Blyth argues that in a highly indebted world, austerity – introduced as an ‘emergency’ measure to save the economy, to right the fiscal ship – has becomes a permanent state of affairs.

As technology improves and organizations become more complex, the theory and practice of contract design will only increase in importance. As such, we owe, we owe a great debt to this year’s Nobel laureates in economics for giving us powerful tools to structure effective contracts.

Behavioral economics as a practice is here to stay, suggests a new report. Whether it remains a separate discipline or is absorbed by the other social sciences remains an open question.

As we are often reminded, we urgently and drastically need to limit our use of one shared resource – fossil fuels – and its effect on another – the climate. But how realistic is this goal, both for national leaders and for us? Well, psychology may hold some answers.

In the final installment of the 10 top essays submitted to the ESRC reflecting on how a social science-influenced world will look in 2015, we present Ian Quigg’s ruminations on what capitalism will look like after another half century’s buffeting by the ‘perennial gale of creative destruction.’

The answer sadly, is ruin. But if you’ve already beaten the odds once, maybe you can do so again …

A sense of crisis is developing in economics after two Federal Reserve economists came to the alarming conclusion that economics research is usually not replicable.

The Nobel committee has awarded Princeton’s Angus Deaton ‘for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.’ But in fact, he was awarded for building bridges – between disciplines, between theory and reality, between people.

The impact of John Nash’s initial work has been immense over the past 65 years. It seems certain that in his absence, the frameworks and mathematical language he refined and developed will continue to provide new insights into a diverse range of problems.