Economics of Innovation

Why is mainstream economics in crisis? How can a pluralism of perspectives help to solve it? And why should you care? Join this guided tour through the complex landscape of economic thinking from philosophy of science to pedagogical innovations! https://unsplash.com/photos/1-29wyvvLJA

This text provides an easy to understand introduction to complexity economics for non-specialist audiences such as bachelor's students.

The article pursues the two related questions of how economists pretend to know and why they want to know at all. It is argued that both the economic form of knowledge and the motivation of knowing have undergone a fundamental change during the course of the 20th century. The knowledge of important contemporary economic textbooks has little in common with an objective, decidedly scientifically motivated knowledge. Rather, their contents and forms follow a productive end, aiming at the subjectivity of their readers.

What does the financialization of housing, weakened pension rights, and land grabbing have in common with 2020's post-pandemic crisis? David Harvey explains how these are all results of the increased tendency of accumulation by dispossession, where profits today are mostly generated by dispossession after a crisis and not by production. Will governments in every part of the world be able to prevent that pattern from happening again in the near future?