By William K. Black
April 19, 2016 Bloomington, MN
The journalist Adam Davidson has written an interesting article about economics and Bernie Sanders. As an economic adviser to Bernie I found his take on Keynesian and institutional economics of considerable interest. Institutional economics, contrary to Davidson’s take on it, is thriving and the University of Missouri at Kansas City has long been a center of institutional economics. (I am one of the scholars at UMKC that works largely in this field.) Davidson treats institutional economics, which overwhelmingly studies microeconomics and the “micro foundations” of the economy as having been rendered obsolete by the transformation that Keynes’ insights sparked in the study of macroeconomics.
