The Daily Economy

The Great Recession was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Like the Depression, the Great Recession was precipitated by a combination of excessive credit creation and misguided government policy. Excessive credit, or purchasing media, makes people feel wealthier than they really are, triggering unsustainable consumption. For decades, AIER has pointed to excessive credit…

While students were occupied with their research projects during our new Winter Program, their professor, Lorri Halverson, and I were working on a paper summarizing our experiential learning approach, which is the basis for educational programming at AIER. The key idea of this approach is to blend learning within the academic classroom and learning within…

AIER has a long history of fostering schools of economic thought that don’t adhere to the views that currently dominate mainstream academia. One paradigm that reflects recent advances in other scientific fields but also confirms views put forward by AIER for decades is the growing discipline called complexity economics. As mathematical modeling came to dominate…

What drives earnings growth for U.S. workers? In some form or another, this was the question addressed by researchers at a session of the American Economic Association’s annual meeting that I attended earlier this month in Chicago. There are three important channels for an employed worker to increase earnings. He or she can get a…

The Education Division of AIER is not only creating and executing innovative programs, but also conducts scientific research on the impact of those programs on their constituencies. At the recent 2017 annual meeting of the American Economic Association (AEA) in Chicago, I presented the results of the first two cycles of the Teach-the-Teachers Initiative program,…