Should Economists be Experts in Markets or in Human Nature?

Firms are the primary places where economic activity takes place in modern capitalist economies: they are where most stuff is produced; where many of us spend 40 hours a week; and where big decisions are made about how to allocate resources. Establishing how they work is hugely important because it helps us to understand patterns of production and consumption, including how firms will react to changes in economic conditions and policy. And a well-established literature – led by post-Keynesians and institutionalists – holds that the best way to determine how firms work is to…wait for it...ask firms how they work. This a clearly sensible proposition that is contested in economics for some reason, but we’ll ignore the controversy here and just explore the theory that springs from this approach.

Does Karl Polanyi's work “The Great Transformation” serve to analyse the current multiple crisis and social movements? Nancy Fraser revises Polanyi's concept of a double movement to capture social forces in the aftermath of the economic crisis of the 1930s – on the one side marketization and on the other hand social protection. Fraser proposes to talk about a triple movement and to account for emancipatory struggles. In the lecture, she discusses interactions as well as conflicts between those three forces, in particular conflicting aims of social protection. The lecture presents the content of her paper “A TRIPLE MOVEMENT? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi“ in the New Left Review (2013).

Economics is dogmatic, monolithic, merely quantitative, highly normative, strongly political, primarily ethical, pseudo-scientific, and manipulative.

Was bedeutet Wirtschaftsdemokratie und wie werden darin Entscheidungen getroffen? Wie unterscheidet sich Wirtschaftsdemokratie von Mitsprache und kann über Wohlstand und Wachstum demokratisch entschieden werden? Alex Demirovic stellt im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung „Wohlstand ohne Wachstum“ Überlegungen zur Anwendung demokratischer Entscheidungen auf Produktion und Finanzmärkte an. Dabei hinterfragt er die Dichotomie von Markt und Staat und diskutiert, welche Folgen Wirtschaftsdemokratie für die Konzepte Eigentum, unternehmerische Freiheit oder Wettbewerbsfähigkeit hat.