Dear all,

This Wednesday, April 30th, Avner Offer will be presenting the topic "Economic Theory and Policy Norms: The Nobel Economists" at the HPPE seminar at the London School of Economics. The seminar will take place in the room EAS E 168 (East Building) at 1 pm. Everyone is welcome.


Abstract
The Nobel Prize provides a high-quality sample of economics. Its recipients were more liberal than conservative, more empirical than formalist.  In its policy role, their neoclassical economics responded to the challenge of social democracy. The welfare problem was not inequality, but how to provide for life-cycle contingencies. Economics suggested intertemporal trading, while social democracy applied social risk pooling. Initially, neoclassical economics was a harmony theory in support of the low-tax status quo, in which everyone gets what they deserve. When social democracy became the new high-tax status quo, economics responded by becoming a cluster of theories about cheating, in which many received what they did not deserve. In rejecting optimality, economics became indeterminate, at a cost to its normative authority.

About the presenter
Avner Offer is Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of All Souls College. He initially studied land tenure and the economics of war, and published Property and Politics 1870-1914 (CUP, 1981), and The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (OUP, 1989) as well as many articles.  Subsequently he  focused on consumption and the quality of life and has published The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (OUP, 2006). Currently he is studying  the transition from Social Democracy to Market Liberalism, and is completing  a book on the origins and consequences of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

The rest of the programme for the Summer term is available at : http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/seminars/HPPE/home.aspx

All queries about the seminar can be addressed to Gerardo Serra ([log in to unmask]).

Kind regards,
Gerardo Serra and Raphaelle Schwarzberg

Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://lse.ac.uk/emailDisclaimer