Forecasting Inflation: An Art as Well as a Science!

Art hangs as science lure

The culmination of artist Aya Ben Ron's six-month residence at the Wellcome Trust in London has been hanging dramatically in the main atrium of the building throughout the summer. The 25-metre-long " Hanging " glistens with kaleidoscopic, colourful images and patterns but on closer scrutiny holds a darker message. The colourful images are revealed to comprise images of various human diseases an...

The practice of clinical medicine as an art and as a science.

The practice of modern medicine is the application of science, the ideal of which has the objective of value-neutral truth. The reality is diVerent: practice varies widely between and within national medical communities. Neither evidence from randomised controlled trials nor observational methods can dictate action in particular circumstances. Their conclusions are applied by value judgments th...

The scholarship of teaching as science and as art.

Afterword: Political Ethnography as Art and Science

Adam Ashforth has written one of the recent political ethnographies I most admire. His Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa draws on a total of about three years’ residence during the 1990s in Soweto (South West Township), an Apartheid-built black suburb of Johannesburg, plus subsequent visits to his adopted family and friends there. Earlier, Ashforth wrote an impressive historic...

Gold as an Inflation Hedge?*

This paper attempts to reconcile an apparent contradiction between short-run and long-run movements in the price of gold. A theoretical model is developed that suggests a set of the conditions that would have to be satisfied for the price of gold to rise over time at the general rate of inflation and hence be an effective long-run hedge against inflation. The model also demonstrates that short-...