Rethinking Economics for the 21st Century:
It seems that Nobel Prize Laureates in Economics often receive a prize for something that is not central to their work. One reason is that formal reason often sticks to mainstream, but the Nobel Committee often supports dissent. This 3-session lecture series explores the idea that an entirely new economics could be created just by adding up a dozen Nobel Laureates.
Lecture 1：Monday, March 11th 2:00 pm
Beyond GDP: Economics of the Anthropocene
Global warming poses great challenges to economic theory and policy, which was recognized by the recent Nobel award to William Nordhaus, who contributed seminal research to the integration of economics and climate models. The lecture discusses the limitations of the established approach and opens new vistas on ecological economics as a part of a new paradigm in Earth system sciences, which have far-reaching implications for policies.
Lecture 2：Wednesday, March 13th 2:00 pm
Beyond Economic Man: The New Economics of Human Behaviour
The rise of behavioural economics has changed many assumptions and methods of economics, which was also recognized by a Nobel award for Richard Thaler (2017), and earlier Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith (2002), and other related awards, such as Thomas Schelling (2005), George Akerlof (2001) and Elinor Ostrom (2009). If we put all these contributions together, and add a dose of philosophical reflection, an entirely new paradigm for understanding economic behaviour emerges, which shifts away from axiomatic assumptions on rationality to an approach based on biology, anthropology, psychology and the social sciences, and which is rigorously based on empirical evidence.
Lecture 3：Thursday, March 14th 7:00 pm
Beyond Micro: Institutional and Behavioural Foundations of Macroeconomics
After the financial crisis of 2008, discontent with macroeconomics has grown in almost all quarters of economics, including leaders of the established paradigm, reaching from renowned critics such as Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel award 2001) to established scholars in the policy domain such as Olivier Blanchard. The 2017 Nobel laureate Paul Romer attracted much attention with his 2016 paper on the ‘trouble with macroeconomics’. The lecture presents a new perspective based on the economics of institutions which moves away from complex modelling techniques to behavioural, psychological and sociological approaches, which are emerging, for example, in the new approach of ‘narrative economics’ championed by the Nobel laureate Robert Shiller (2013).
