Robert Skidelsky
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In its latest briefing note the IMF warned that world growth would slow in the second half of 2010 and the first half of 2011. Meanwhile the cost of Greek government debt has shot up again, despite the ECB rescue-package, and the IMF will soon inject another 2.5bn euros into the Greek economy. Finally, European trade unions are planning a winter of protest against cuts. These are just the latest glimpses of what is happening in the world economy.
Robert Skidelsky - Europe’s Debt Crisis and Implications for Policy
.Robert Skidelsky's official website
The most important steps to improve the training of young economists would be to make economic history and the history of economic thought compulsory in all undergraduate teaching of economics. Both survive, if at all, as curricular options that the brightest are discouraged from taking. The rich history of economic thought has been replaced by a narrow range of currently fashionable mathematical "models" taught and often learned by rote: the sweeping panorama of economic history, by a training in econometrics, the accuracy of whose data is necessarily confined to the last few years. Yet it is these theoretical models and econometric forecasting techniques that were caught lamentably short by the economic collapse of 2008.