Al-Ghazali's Sufistic Economy Concept; From Homo Islamicus To Economic Progress

From Homo Economicus to Homo Sapiens

R esponding to a request for a forecast is especially tricky for someone like me, who specializes in other people’s biases. Research in psychology suggests that certain biases are very likely to creep into my forecasts about the future of economics (or anything else). 1. Optimism (and wishful thinking). We all tend to be optimistic about the future. On the first day of my MBA class on decision-...

From Economic Inequality to Economic Freedom: Constitutional Political Economy in the New Gilded Age

From Neanderthal to Homo sapiens

Project background During the course of evolution, the human brain has undergone tremendous expansion. This has led to the development of complex neurocircuits of unmatched complexity, highly social behaviour, expanded language use and cognitive superiority. A small number of infants, however, are born with significantly smaller brains, a condition called primary microcephaly (PM). Infants with...

Measuring Economic Progress

Economists have been inquiring into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations for centuries,1 but the regular and systematic construction of official quantitative measures of relative economic progress is a phenomenon of recent decades. A key role in this transformation was played by Colin Clark, who held that ‘[c]omparisons of economic welfare between one community and another, one econom...

Economic growth in the New Economy: evidence from advanced economies

Firstly, by surveying recent research, this paper confirms that both the production and use of ICT have been the factors behind the improved economic performance of the United States in the 1990s. However, the evidence for the New Economy is much weaker outside the United States. Secondly, the paper applies growth accounting to estimate the impacts in Finland. It is shown that the contribution ...