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The human imprint on the biosphere has become so pronounced in recent years that there has been talk of a new geological era, the 'Anthropocene'.
Towards an Integrated Paradigm in Heterodox Economics
"Energy issues have always been important in international relations, but in recent years may have become even more important than in the past due to the widespread awareness of existing limits to energy sources and negative climate impacts. The course discusses global trends in energy consumption and production, various available scenarios for potential developments in the coming decades, the availability of oil reserves and the evolution of the oil industry. It then discusses natural gas and highlights the differences between oil and gas. It will also discuss renewable energy sources, nuclear energy and EU energy policy.
The course aims at providing students whose main interest is in international relations a background on energy resources, technology and economic realities to allow them to correctly interpret the political impact of current developments. It also aims at providing students, who already have a technical background in energy science or engineering, with the broad global view of energy issues that will allow them to better understand the social, economic and political impact of their technical knowledge."
Politics and Economics of International Energy
This article explores the production function, the prevailing view of capital that underpins it, and the main alternative perspective. By exploring these perspectives, the authors aim to provide students with a foundational understanding of the controversies surrounding the treatment of capital in production, a topic expressly excluded from mainstream textbooks.
Why We Should Think Twice About Production Functions
As opposed to the conventional over-simplified assumption of self-interested individuals, strong evidence points towards the presence of heterogeneous other-regarding preferences in agents. Incorporating social preferences – specifically, trust and reciprocity - and recognizing the non-constancy of these preferences across individuals can help models better represent the reality.
A fresh perspective to economic theory: Social preferences and their impact on gender and policy
Caring activities are one central element of feminist economists' analysis – also since in particular unremunerated work is a blind spot in mainstream economics and most other economic paradigms. Those focus on the market sphere: activities are considered as productive and as real labour if they are remunerated and market-intermediated. Goods and services are considered as labour if they create a value which can be traded on the market. Feminist Economics remarks that this perspective creates certain dichotomies and consequent devaluations: unproductive – productive; private – public; unpaid – remunerated OR paid less – well paid; female – male; soft work – hard work; caring – rationality.
Reproductive Labour and Care
Understanding international trade is central to economics and is currently a hot political issue. It’s an area where popular perceptions of mainstream economics are low, since they have historically missed some important downsides of trade agreements, especially the hollowing out of former manufacturing hubs in the Western world. et economists have for long time had a theory of trade with an impressive amount of scientific clout behind it: the gravity trade model.
A Theory of Enormous Gravity
The module is designed to first present some of the main schools of thought from a historical and methodological perspective. Each week we explore and critically assess the main tenants of each school of thought. In the second part of the module we link history of economic thought and methodology to a specific and contemporary economic question. The second part allows you to engage with current economic issues with an awareness of methodology and methodological differences and with some knowledge of the history of economics.
History of Economic Thought
Here we look at the effect of the 2008 Climate Change Act passed in Parliament in the United Kingdom as an effort to curb emissions in all sectors. The Act aside from setting goals to become a low-carbon economy sets up an independent committee on Climate Change to ensure the implementation of policies to comply with the ultimate goal of 80% reduction in total emissions in 2050. I make use of the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) to create a comparative case study in which the creation of a synthetic UK serves as a counterfactual where the treatment never occurred (Cunningham, 2018).
Synthetic Control Method for Estimating the Effect of the Climate Change Act of 2008 in Britain
The notion that the demand and supply side are independent is a key feature of textbook undergraduate economics and of modern macroeconomic models. Economic output is thought to be constrained by the productive capabilities of the economy - the ‘supply-side' - through technology, demographics and capital investment. In the short run a boost in demand may increase GDP and employment due to frictions such as sticky wages, but over the long-term successive rises in demand without corresponding improvements on the supply side can only create inflation as the economy reaches capacity. In this post I will explore the alternative idea of demand-led growth, where an increase in demand can translate into long-run supply side gains. This theory is most commonly associated with post-Keynesian economics, though it has been increasingly recognised in the mainstream literature.
It’s Demand All the Way Down
This lecture is based on the “Introducing the Economy” chapter from the Economy Studies book, which introduces the first building block in their framework for transforming the economics education. The aim is to give students a feel and
understanding of the economy as part of a bigger whole. Thus, it is aimed to introduce to students before getting into the economics curriculum with theory and models.
Introducing the Economy
In both economics textbooks and public perceptions central banks are a fact of life. On the wall of my A-level economics classroom there was the Will Rogers quote “there have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking”, summarising how many economists view the institution. There is a widespread belief that there is something different about money which calls for a central authority to manage its operation, a view shared even by staunch free marketeers such as Milton Friedman. This belief is not without justification, since money underpins every transaction in a way that apples do not, but we should always be careful not to take existing institutions for granted and central banking is no exception. In this post I will look at the idea of private or free banking, where banks compete (and cooperate) to issue their own currency.
Whither Central Banks?
This innovative book offers targeted strategies for effectively and efficiently teaching economics at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It provides professors and other teachers of economics various techniques to engage and retain the interest of students, and challenges them to apply both knowledge and methodological tools to a range of economic problems.
New Developments in Economic Education
"A serious reconsideration of the 'economics of science' is long overdue," say Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent in the introduction to Science Bought and Sold. Indeed, it is only recently that one could speak of a field of economics of science at all.
Science Bought and Sold
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.
The ‘How Firms Work’ Approach to How Firms Work
This paper is a product of an online workshop held in Nigeria on the topic Unemployment: Policy Review and Recommendations. It explores the various unemployment policies introduced by the Nigerian Government and analysis how effective they are and suggests some practicable solutions to solving unemployment problems in the country.
The workshop was organized by Rethinking Economics The Uploaders (RETU) as part of the project Solving the Major Economic Problem in Nigeria (SMEPN), an output of the Global Pluralist Economics Training (GPET).
More details here: https://www.retheuploaders.org/programs/SMEPN
Unemployment in Nigeria: Policy Review and Recommendations
Potts (economics, University of Queensland) proposes evolutionary microeconomics as a synthesis of the collective schools of heterodox economic thought with complex systems theory and graph theory.
The New Evolutionary Microeconomics
In this talk, Virgil Henry Storr, a Research Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at George Mason University, talks about his research into to post-disaster recovery and the role that social entrepreneurship plays in rebuilding the communities and social networks that get disrupted, or entirely eliminated.
Community revival in the wake of disaster: Lessons in local entrepreneurship
The principle of effective demand, and the claim of its validity for a monetary production economy in the short and in the long run, is the core of heterodox macroeconomics, as currently found in all the different strands of post-Keynesian economics (Fundamentalists, Kaleckians, Sraffians, Kaldorians, Institutionalists) and also in some strands of neo-Marxian economics, particularly in the monopoly capitalism and underconsumptionist school In this contribution, we will therefore outline the foundations of the principle of effective demand and its relationship with the respective notion of a capitalist or a monetary production economy in the works of Marx, Kalecki and Keynes. Then we will deal with heterodox short-run macroeconomics and it will provide a simple short-run model which is built on the principle of effective demand, as well as on distribution conflict between different social groups (or classes): rentiers, managers and workers. Finally, we will move to the long run and we will review the integration of the principle of effective demand into heterodox/post-Keynesian approaches towards distribution and growth.
The principle of effective demand: Marx, Kalecki, Keynes and beyond
In spite of the manifold critique about the state of economics in the aftermath of the financial crisis, an even increasing presence of economists and economic experts can be observed in the public sphere during the last years. On the one hand this reflects the still dominant position of economics in the social sciences as well as the sometimes ignorant attitude of economists towards findings of other social sciences. On the other hand this paper shows that the public debate on politico-economic issues among economists is dominated by a specific subgroup of economists, tightly connected to an institutional network of “German neoliberalism”. This group of “public economists” (i) is dominant in public debates even after the financial crisis, (ii) reproduces the formative German economic imaginary of the Social Market Economy in a German neoliberal interpretation and (iii) has a good access to German economic policymaking, rooted in a long history of economic policy advice.
Still the queens of social sciences? (Post-)Crisis power balances of “public economists” in Germany
Gender, Development, and Globalization is the leading primer on global feminist economics and development. Lourdes Benería, a pioneer in the field of feminist economics, is joined in this second edition by Gunseli Berik and Maria Floro to update the text to reflect the major theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions and global developments in the last decade.
Gender, Development, and Globalization
Want to learn more about behavioural economics and its application to public policy? Take this free course from the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government.
Behavioural insights for public policy
Examine what would happen if we were to deploy blockchain technology at the sovereign level and use it to create a decentralized cashless economy. This book explains how finance and economics work today, and how the convergence of various technologies related to the financial sector can help us find solutions to problems, such as excessive debt creation, banks getting too big to fail, and shadow banking.
The Blockchain Alternative
UBC's Henry Siu, a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics, speaks about innovation in economics, technological progress and what it means for the fut...
Understanding technological change
In this short talk 'Measuring the Danger of Segregation' Trevon Logan, Professor of Economics at The Ohio State University, explores the impacts of structural racism on economics and health.
Measuring the Danger of Segregation
Steven G. Medema is a Research Professor at Duke University. His research focuses on the History of Economic Thought, having published extensively on the issue of social costs of production (conceptualized as externalities in neoclassical economics). In this recorded seminar, he exposes his working paper on the history of the concept of externalities in economic literature, starting from Pigou’s “The Economics of Welfare” (1920), where Pigou makes the case for governmental intervention in the market where there is a divergence between private and social costs or benefits of a productive activity. T
'Exceptional and Unimportant'? The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Externalities in Economic Analysis
The book provides an excellent comparative perspective on New Keynesian "New Consensus" economics and Post-Keynesian Economics at a beginner level. It also offers an interactive tool to understand how the economic models work, especially from a heterodox / pluralist perspective.
Introduction to Macroeconomics: Pluralist and Interactive
Colanders Microeconomics 11e is specifically designed to help today’s students succeed in the principles of economics course and grasp economics concepts they can apply in their daily lives
Microeconomics
"Leveraged" provides an authoritative guide to the new economics of our crisis-filled century with a focus on financial crises and financial economics.
Leveraged
Colanders Macroeconomics 11e is specifically designed to help today’s students succeed in the principles of economics course and grasp economics concepts they can apply in their daily lives.
Macroeconomics 11ed.
The Microeconomics of Complex Economies uses game theory, modeling approaches, formal techniques, and computer simulations to teach useful, accessible approaches to real modern economies.
The Microeconomics of Complex Economies
Renowned scholars elaborate a critique on neoclassical economics and how it was unable to predict and even favoured the financial crisis. They refer to DSGE models, equilibrium theory and rational agents – a brief insight in the critique on neoclassic economics.
Financial Instability Mini-Documentary
In order to describe the global structure of the monetary and financial system and its effects on the global economy, most economics textbooks rely on unappropriated theories that provide nothing but outdated descriptions. In this talk, key speakers in economics, economic history and banking try to make this complex system a little more understandable by relying on real-world insights.
Global Money: Past, Present, Future
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