The series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) and the Departments of Sociology, History, and Economics & Economic History
Date: Wednesday, 19th September 2018
Time: 4:15pm
Venue: Eden Grove Seminar Room 2
THE PAPER: The premise that markets are well behaved and converge to equilibrium continues to dominate macroeconomic theory and policy-making. Macroeconomic models not derived from explicit utility or wealth-maximizing assumptions and rational expectations are considered inadmissible. This approach not only limits the possibility of deriving results with involuntary unemployment. Like the act of throwing the baby with the bathwater, this is a strategy to get rid of macroeconomics altogether. A hard look at the source of these micro-foundations is needed to assess the validity of this approach.
THE SPEAKER: Alejandro Nadal is Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies of El Colegio de México. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Paris (Nanterre) in 1981. His publications cover a wide variety of subjects, from technical change and resource management, to macroeconomics and general equilibrium theory. He is the author of “Rethinking Macroeconomics for Sustainability” (Zed Books 2011), a book designed to link the most pressing issues in macroeconomics with the key components of the debate on global sustainability. He was Chair of the Theme on the Environment, Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment (TEMTI) of the Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (CEESP-IUCN) from 2004 to 2016. He has been on the editorial boards of many academic journals, including “World Development” and the online academic journal “Economic Thought of the World Economics Association”. Professor Nadal publishes a weekly column in “La Jornada”, one of Mexico’s national newspapers.