The Lucas critique, named for Robert Lucas' work on macroeconomic policymaking, argues that it is naïve to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data, especially highly aggregated historical data.[1]

The basic idea pre-dates Lucas' contribution (related ideas are expressed as Campbell's Law and Goodhart's Law), but in a 1976 paper Lucas drove home the point that this simple notion invalidated policy advice based on conclusions drawn from large-scale macroeconometric models. Because the parameters of those models were not structural, i.e. not policy-invariant, they would necessarily change whenever policy (the rules of the game) was changed. Policy conclusions based on those models would therefore potentially be misleading. This argument called into question the prevailing large-scale econometric models that lacked foundations in dynamic economic theory. Lucas summarized his critique:

"Given that the structure of an econometric model consists of optimal decision rules of economic agents, and that optimal decision rules vary systematically with changes in the structure of series relevant to the decision maker, it follows that any change in policy will systematically alter the structure of econometric models."[2]
The Lucas critique suggests that if we want to predict the effect of a policy experiment, we should model the "deep parameters" (relating to preferences, technology and resource constraints) that govern individual behavior. We can then predict what individuals will do, taking into account the change in policy, and then aggregate the individual decisions to calculate the macroeconomic effects of the policy change.[3]

The Lucas critique was influential not only because it cast doubt on many existing models, but also because it encouraged macroeconomists to build microfoundations for their models. Microfoundations had always been thought to be desirable; Lucas convinced many economists they were essential. Real Business Cycle economists, starting with Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott, focused their research on using microfoundations to formulate macroeconomic models. Contemporary macroeconomic models microfounded on the interaction of rational agents are often called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models.[citation needed]

My colleagues and I found dramatic evidence of this positive relationship between markets and morality in our study of fairness in simple societies—hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, nomadic herders, and small-scale sedentary farmers—in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Twelve professional anthropologists and economists visited these societies and played standard ultimatum, public goods, and trust games with the locals. As in advanced industrial societies, members of all of these societies exhibited a considerable degree of moral motivation and a willingness to sacrifice monetary gain to achieve fairness and reciprocity, even in anonymous one-shot situations. More interesting for our purposes, we measured the degree of market exposure and cooperation in production for each society, and we found that the ones that regularly engage in market exchange with larger surrounding groups have more pronounced fairness motivations. The notion that the market economy makes people greedy, selfish, and amoral is simply fallacious.

Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre (French pronunciation: [də mɛstʁ][1] 1 April 1753 – 26 February 1821) was a French-speaking Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat. He defended hierarchical societies and a monarchical State in the period immediately following the French Revolution. Despite his close ties with France, Maistre was a subject of the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, whom he served as member of the Savoy Senate (1787–1792), ambassador to Russia (1803–1817), and minister of state to the court in Turin (1817–1821).[2]

Maistre, a key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, saw monarchy both as a divinely sanctioned institution and as the only stable form of government. He called for the restoration of the House of Bourbon to the throne of France and argued that the Pope should have ultimate authority in temporal matters. Maistre also claimed that it was the rationalist rejection of Christianity which was directly responsible for the disorder and bloodshed which followed the French Revolution of 1789.

Isaiah Berlin Centenary
A series of podcasts to mark the centenary of the birth on 6th June 1909 of Isaiah Berlin, founding President of Wolfson College, Oxford University and regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the 20th century.

Modern soceity is synonymous with progress, isn't it? Not according to the eighteenth century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He argued that civilization is for the most part morally corrupting. Melissa Lane explains his position in this episode of Philosophy Bites.

Rousseau was, in Berlin’s words, “one of the most sinister and most formidable enemies of liberty in the whole history of modern thought.” So how can this proponent of freedom also be an enemy of liberty? The heart of the paradox, according to Berlin, is Rousseau’s belief that “nature is harmony,” a belief in the essential harmony of the universe that was common among Enlightenment philosophers.

There is a short step from this belief in harmony to the belief that “what I truly want cannot collide with what somebody else truly wants.” In other words, disagreement between two truly enlightened rational people is impossible. Therefore it follows that if I am rational and enlightened, and you disagree with me, you are simply irrational. Furthermore I am justified in forcing you to do what you truly desire (even if you are not consciously aware of your true desire.)

What is republicanism? Philip Pettit discusses this important political tradition in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast, emphasizing the centrality of a principle of non-domination. 

PHILIP PETTIT is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, where he has taught political theory and philosophy since 2002. Irish by background and training, he was a lecturer in University College, Dublin, a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bradford, before moving in 1983 to the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University; there he held a professorial position jointly in Social and Political Theory and Philosophy. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2010; he is also a fellow of the Australian academies in Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds honorary professorships in Philosophy at Sydney University and Queen's University, Belfast and has been awarded honorary degrees by the National University of Ireland (Dublin), the University of Crete, Lund University, Universite de Montreal and Queen's University, Belfast. In 2010 he won a Guggenheim fellowship and spent 2010-11 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences at Stanford University.

He works in moral and political theory and on background issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. His recent single-authored books include The Common Mind (OUP 1996), Republicanism (OUP 1997), A Theory of Freedom (OUP 2001), Rules, Reasons and Norms (OUP 2002), Penser en Societe (PUF, Paris 2004), Examen a Zapatero (Temas de Hoy, Madrid 2008) and Made with Words: Hobbes on Mind, Society and Politics (PUP 2008). His recent co-authored books include The Economy of Esteem (OUP 2004), with Geoffrey Brennan; Mind, Morality and Explanation (OUP 2004), a selection of papers with Frank Jackson and Michael Smith; A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero's Spain (PUP 2010), with Jose Marti; and Group Agency (OUP 2011), with Christian List, LSE. He is currently finalizing a number of other projects: the text of the 2010 Seeley Lectures in Cambridge University to be published in 2012 by CUP under the title On the People's Terms; and the text of the 2009 Blackwell Lectures in Philosophy, Brown University, Morality and its Place in Nature, to be published by Wiley Blackwell, probably in 2013. Also forthcoming is a book with W.W.Norton for a general audience, entitled Just Freedom. In 2011 he gave the Uehiro Lectures in Ethics at Oxford University and is due to give the Frankfurt Lectures, the Wittgenstein Lecutres (Bayreuth) and the Muenster Lectures in 2012, as well as the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Berkeley in 2014-15. Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared from OUP in 2007, edited by Geoffrey Brennan, R.E.Goodin, Frank Jackson and Michael Smith.

For recent interviews on www.philosophybites.com see Philip Pettit on Group Agency and Philip Pettit on Consequentialism
For a recent piece on protests about the financial crises go to laviedesidees.fr see Republican Reflections on the 15-M movement

"The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century may not have been Wittgenstein, or Russell (and he certainly wasn't Heidegger) but he may have been a somewhat obscure and conservative Australian philosopher named David Stove (1927-94). If he wasn't the greatest philosopher of the century, Stove was certainly the funniest and most dazzling defender of common sense . . ."

I arrived with my own prejudices. As a diplomatic specialist in Communism, in China and the Soviet Union I had witnessed at first hand the biggest live experiment in history, as more than a billion human beings, caged in their own countries like laboratory mice, were subjected to the parascientific creed of dialectical materialism and Marxism-Leninism. (The term parascience, nicely evocative of paranormal and la pataphysique, I borrow from Absence of Mind, essays on science and religion by Marilynne Robinson, Yale 2010.) Of the outcome — some hundred million dead, three million in China during 1966-69 the years I was there — there is little more to be said, except to recall how many Western scientists, some eminent, went along with the experiment in the face of the scepticism of Johnson's common reader. 
One example. Professor J.D. Bernal, a first-rank scientist, helped lay the foundations of molecular biology. Inspired by Nikolai Bukharin's lecture on the Marxist roots of Newton, he had earlier endorsed the "proletarian science" of Trofim Lysenko, whose theory of plant genetics Stalin backed because it suggested that the acquired characteristics of the communist New Man could be transmitted in perpetuity. Bukharin was later shot in the show trials of 1938 after torture extracted a confession; Bernal survived till 1971, when he died peacefully, proud of his Stalin Prize, and with no confession. 

As we contemplate the utopian claims of some branches of scientific inquiry today, the damage he and a generation of sympathisers and fellow travellers (including Joseph Needham, and to a lesser extent C.P. Snow) did to the reputation of science itself should not be forgotten. 

All this comes to mind as I try to keep abreast of neuroscience. I am not saying this is the new Marxism, merely that experiments and theories that claim to revolutionise our understanding of ourselves deserve the common reader's vigilance. Remarkable research is under way, but some in the neuroscience fraternity are not content with reinterpreting the world: they want to change it. "The return of political scientism, particularly of a biological variety," Raymond Tallis has written, "should strike a chill to the heart." It does to mine. Today Orwell's Animal Farm would feature a cold-eyed, white-coated meerkat loading troublesome creatures into a brain scanner, before prescribing the necessary treatment.

Will one researcher's discovery deep in the Amazon destroy the foundation of modern linguistics?

The core of Smithian economics, further, is not Max U. It is entry and exit, and is Smith's distinctive contribution to social science.

David Chalmers is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University.

Chalmers is interested in the relationship between mind, brain and reality. He is best known for formulating the "hard problem" of consciousness and for his arguments against materialism.

His 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory was highly successful with both popular and academic audiences. In 2010 he gave the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford. These will shortly be published as his book Constructing the World . He also works on language, metaphysics, and artificial intelligence.

I have a theory that everyone actually lives about one decade (or maybe 15 years); during the others they are just tourists passing through.