Tuesday, 24 March 2020

Another ‘Samuelson, 1948’ moment? Evidence from machine learning

a column by Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, USA) and Wendy Carlin (University College London, UK; CEPR) for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

In the shadow of the Great Depression, Paul Samuelson placed the “really interesting and vital problems of overall economic policy” – notably persistent unemployment – at the front of his introductory text. What future citizens learned from their economics courses was transformed by the new knowledge – Keynesian economics – applied to the new problems.

This column asks whether we are now at a similar juncture. Using topic modelling, it finds that the novel themes in published research in recent decades – concepts that empower economists to address today’s major challenges of climate change, inequality, and the future of work and of property rights in the knowledge-based economy – are strikingly absent from today’s leading textbooks.

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Labels:
Samuelson, economic_theory, economics_textbooks,


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