The original Phillips Curve

The Phillips Curve is a justly famous idea in macroeconomics, showing the trade-off between unemployment and inflation.
A.W.H. Phillips was an engineer by training and constructed this hydraulic model of the economy to illustrate his ideas.


A tip of the hat to Mark Wynne for providing this.

David Laibson: Natural Expectations and Macroeconomic Fluctuations

David Laibson from Harvard University will be giving the keynote address at the upcoming conference on Economics and Psychology, to be held in the UCD Research Building on November 23rd. At the event, Laibson is set to speak on the topic of "Natural Expectations and Economic Behavior". For readers who want a taste in advance, there may be similar grounded covered in a paper by Laibson forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Perspectives: "Natural Expectations and Macroeconomic Fluctuations".

Never Again

A lot of people have compared the boom and bust of the last few years to a bad hangover following a period of drunken excess.We have certainly had quite a lot of "jaysus did I really do that" stories about the Irish boom. It is interesting to see how the IMF blog starts its post on preventing future crises - “Never again can we let ourselves be caught unprepared by an economic and financial crisis of such global magnitude.” - "Never again" certainly does have echoes of hungover thinking. I wonder what the macroeconomic equivalent is of wolving down a breakfast roll, a bottle of coke and a few painkillers.