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1182 results
Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
A Time for Precaution
One method of economic modelling that has become increasingly popular in academia, government and the private sector is Agent Based Models, or ABM. These simulate the actions and interactions of thousands or even millions of people to try to understand the economy – for this reason ABM was once described to me as being “like Sim City without the graphics”. One advantage of ABM is that it is flexible, since you can choose how many agents there are (an agent just means some kind of 'economic decision maker' like a firm, consumer, worker or government); how they behave (do they use complicated or simple rules to make decisions?); as well as the environment they act in, then just run the simulation and see what happens as they interact over time.
Agents, agents everywhere
This video animates part of the talk “On Economics” by Ha-Joon Chang in which he states that economics is not a science for experts but for everyone. Chang further argues why it is important to take into account different perspectives on economics – he identifies at least nine school of thoughts which all have their strengths and weaknesses and presents examples on free trade and well-being. Chang further elaborates on the difficulties of changing the economic status quo.
Economics Is For Everyone!
In this radio program, the anthropologist David Graeber, explores the history of debt in (currently) 12 episodes. The program is based on his book Debt: The First 5000 Years. First, Graeber asks the questions of how debt and money are characterized, which meaning and roles they had in different historic episodes and how they were interrelated. In the most recent episodes, Graeber elaborates on how debt shaped society. He argues that debt had a different moral status in different times of history, one session analyses the current financial and economic crisis and the role of credit in this historical context.
Promises, Promises: A history of debt
The Sufficiency Policy Map is an online tool for initiatives, political actors, organisations and individuals. It provides recommendations, strategies and communication tools for realizing projects and policy around the topic sufficiency. Sufficiency projects have the aim to reduce one's own ecological footprint.
Sufficiency Politics Map
Gilles Carbonnier, Professor of Development Economics and Director of Studies at The Graduate Institute Geneva, explains the emerging field of Humanitarian Economics. It analyses how economics can help to better grasp and respond to humanitarian crises, and why capturing market dynamics - including the humanitarian market itself, or in relation to e.g. kidnapping and detention in war - has become critical.
The Birth of Humanitarian Economics
An essay of the writing workshop on Nigeria’s Readiness for and the Effect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Economic Impact and Possible Disruptions
A historical glimpse of how economists of the 19th century debated the usefulness of mathematics to economics
Mathematical Economics in the 19th Century
This video provides a brief introduction to post-keynesian economics and how the school of thought would tackle climate change.
Clips on Climate: Postkeynesian Economics
In this video University of Warwick Economist Robert Akerlof provides an introduction to a new type of behavioral economics He explains how this type is being driven by a desire to understand how people are shaped by social interactions and what the economic consequences of this are He begins the …
Behavioral Economics: The Next Generation
A multimedia dossier outlining the various dimensions of credit and indebtedness for various actors such as individuals and governments. Special emphasis is put on the reflections of normative and power laden discourse sorrounding the issue of borrowing and on false analogies placed between household and government debt.
Borrowing – I-PEEL.org
At the 2013 Climate, Mind, & Behavior Symposium, Rebecca Adamson of First Peoples Worldwide illustrates alternative economic systems modeled after indigenous worldviews and the power they have in pushing us towards a more sustainable existence.
Rebecca Adamson: Enoughness - Restoring Balance to the Economy
An Introduction to the Political Theory of John Maynard Keynes. John Maynard Keynes was arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century. He discovered the idea that governments should stimulate demand during economic downturns.
An Introduction to the Political Theory of John Maynard Keynes
Peter Boettke, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, talks about the history and the main methodological and epistemological tenets of the Austrian school. He argues that good economics is the mainline tradition of "squaring rational choice with the invisible hand theorem through institutional analysis".
The Austrian Tradition in Economics
In this article, Rob Hoveman breaks down concepts like historical materialism and materialist analysis that are pivotal to understand Marx. He argues that abstractions are necessary for a concrete analysis of society that in turn should inform political practice.
Marx and historical materialism
Ricardo Hausmann says the new industrial policy is an information revelation process about the state of possibilities, the nature of the obstacles and figuring out whether you can sort out the obstacles so that these new activities can take over.
Industrial Policy: Love it or Hate it?
Poster of the different schools of thought made by Sergio A. Berumen. From the Greeks to late 20th and beginning of the 21th century.
General Guide To Schools Of Economic Thought
From the two premises that (1) economies are complex systems and (2) the accumulation of knowledge about reality is desirable, I derive the conclusion that pluralism with regard to economic research programs is a more viable position to hold than monism. To substantiate this claim an epistemological framework of how scholars study their objects of inquiry and relate their models to reality is discussed. Furthermore, it is argued that given the current institutions of our scientific system, economics self-organizes towards a state of scientific unity. Since such a state is epistemologically inferior to a state of plurality, critical intervention is desirable.
The Complexity of Economies and Pluralism in Economics
Trickle Down Economics - an old topic, but still present in our lives. The idea consists of deregulation of the economy and of lower tax for the top in order to increase the "size of the pie" so everybody would have a bigger piece, even with a smaller share.
A critique to Trickle-down economics
During his life, Keynes was credited with, amongst other things, with helping to save capitalism from the Great Depression, funding the war against the Nazis and building post-war decades of growth and rising prosperity. And when the global crisis struck in 2008, it was his ideas that the world's leaders turned to help avoid another depression.
Masters Of Money | John Maynard Keynes
Prof. Robert Wade (London School of Economics, UK) discusses industrial policy, the challenges of economic development for emerging countries like Brazil and...
Prof. Robert Wade discusses industrial policy - Rethinking the State
Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to follow through on new year’s resolutions, such as to exercise more or to start saving more money towards retirement? The agent that most traditional economic models are based on would not struggle to keep up these resolutions. These agents are referred to as homo economicus.
Homo Economicus: Why are new year’s resolutions so difficult to maintain and economic models so bad at predicting our behaviour?
As tax day approached, St. Francis College Economics Professors launched their first Economics Week with three days of guest speakers and student research. Randall Wray explains some basic principles of Modern Monetary Theory.
Modern Money Theory for Beginners
This paper starts with an evaluation of three common arguments against pluralism in economics: (1) the claim that economics is already pluralist, (2) the argument that if there was the need for greater plurality, it would emerge on its own, and (3) the assertion that pluralism means ‘anything goes’ and is thus unscientific. Pluralist responses to all three arguments are summarized. The third argument is identified to relate to a greater challenge for pluralism: an epistemological trade-off between diversity and consensus that suggests moving from a discussion about ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ towards a discussion about the adequate degree of plurality. We instantiate the trade-off by showing how it originates from two main challenges: the need to derive adequate quality criteria for a pluralist economics, and the necessity to propose strategies that ensure the communication across different research programs. The paper concludes with some strategies to meet these challenges.
Pluralism in economics: its critiques and their lessons
By conducting a discourse analysis (SKAD) in the field of academic economics textbooks, this paper aims at reconstructing frames and identity options offered to undergraduate students relating to the questions ‘Why study economics?’ and ‘Who do I become by studying economics?’. The analysis showed three major frames and respective identity offerings, all of which are contextualized theoretically, with prominent reference to the Foucauldian reflection of the science of Political Economy. Surprisingly, none of them encourages the student to think critically, as could have been expected in a pedagogical context. Taken together, economics textbooks appear as a “total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible action” (Foucault), therefore, as a genuine example of Foucauldian power structures.
The power of economic textbooks: A discourse analysis
This infographic gives a summary of the 2018 Trade Wars. This simple, compiled overview is suitable for those without a strong political or economic background.
The infographic explains briefly basic concepts related to trade and provides a short timeline of events. It furthermore checks Trump administration's arguments to launch the the trade war against facts and estimates of how the 2018 trade war can affect the global and North-American economy.
2018 Trade Wars Infographic
The article is a formal response to the debate between the economists Diane Coyle and Howard Reed, whose articles were published online by Prospect magazine in 2018. Then, it was taken by Rethinking Economics as representative for the vision of the global network which advocates for changing economics curricula. In fact, it clearly solves some issues within the debate around pluralism by explaining its common misunderstandings among academics and its true - often mislead - meaning.
Deliberate Misunderstandings in Economics: What Pluralism Really Means
Since Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Price in Economic Sciences in 2002, a new branch of economics gained academic and popular interest. That is, the so-called area of behavioural economics. However, some scholars claim that this new area of economics is not changing much of the mainstream paradigm. Why?
Is Behavioural Economics the New Mainstream?
In this blog article Steve Keen elaborates on flawed climate change modelling and mainstream economics forecasts. In specific, he stresses the climate change forecasts of the DICE model (“Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy”) by Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner William Nordhaus.
The Cost of Climate Change
In this post, Rethinking Economics sets out what it means to decolonise economics education and how we can do that. The article first breaks decolonising down into a "mind-set" and a "process", then applies this process to economics education. It finishes with a reading list and some suggested actions to get you started decolonising economics today.
Let's Decolonise Economics Education!
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.
An essay on the putative knowledge of textbook economics
This lecture takes a look at the consequences of COVID 19 from a feminist economics perspective Professor Kabeer analyses a range of different impacts associated with COVID 19 and explores the kinds of policies that such a feminist economics lens would suggest for a more resilient and equitable future Naila …
Gender and COVID-19: a feminist economics lens
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