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Book Forum

The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run — or Ruin — an Economy

Riverhead Hardcover, 2014

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Date and Time
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Location
Hayek Auditorium
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Featuring
Featuring the author Tim Harford, Senior Columnist, Financial Times; Presenter, BBC Radio 4; and Visiting Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford; with comments by Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics, George Mason University; moderated by Dalibor Rohac, Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, Cato Institute.

In his new book, Tim Harford attempts to demystify macroeconomics in the same way his earlier bestseller, The Undercover Economist, demystified microeconomics. Using his characteristic conversational style, Harford will discuss abstract macroeconomic ideas, explaining the most common models of recessions and the difficulty of discriminating between them on empirical grounds. For example, was the crisis of 2008 driven by supply- or demand-side factors? And why do failures of the financial sector seem to have such severe economic consequences? He will not shy away from other topics, including income inequality, or the growing interest in alternative measures of economic well-being, such as self-reported happiness. Please join us for a discussion of what macroeconomists believe about the economy and of why those beliefs often seem to lead to bad public policy.