Bank of England guru: We're crowdsourcing economics


The Bank of England is opening up its research efforts. Why?

Historically our research has been confined to this building and we haven't been very good at spelling out what we don't know. For the first time in our 320-year history, we are reaching out to researchers beyond the bank. We know that modern challenges can't all be resolved in-house, so we're hoping others will help us. It's a more crowdsourced, open-access approach.


Why did you decide a change was needed?

It is partly a sackcloth-and-ashes response to the global financial crisis, because some of our models and ways of thinking didn't bear the scrutiny that they came under. As a discipline, economics has been quite blinkered. In the light of the crisis, what better time to do some more cross-fertilisation between disciplines?


What are you hoping to achieve?

We're trying to make better sense of social systems like the economy and ...


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