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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay, capitalists and governors, Indian and British alike, used moments of crisis to justify interventions that delimited the city as a distinct object and progressively excluded laborers and migrants from it.
2019
Level: advanced
Making the Modern Slum
"Specialise!" is the advice often given by career advisers, school teachers and the like. David Epstein takes the opposite position: In an ever more specialised, highly complex world, it pays to have good old-fashioned broad common knowledge in as many areas as you take interest in, both in terms of intellectual curiosity and professional success. To have a decent grasp of various aspects of life means to be able to discern the links between them, thus developing a better understanding of how our world works and what drives events as they unfold.
2020
Level: beginner
Range
The website contains a vast amount of information on the history of economic thought. It presents thinkers, their main works (and links to those works) and schools of thought which are sorted by political economy schools, neoclassical schools, alternative schools as well as thematic schools.
Level: advanced
The history of economic thought website
This multimedia dossier explores the production chain of smartphones. In particular due to the violation of workers' rights and low payments, the author Benjamin Selwyn calls those production structures global poverty chains. In this context, he points to the importance of workers' struggles.
2016
Level: beginner
Production Chain of Smartphones
Exploring Economics, an open-access e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
2013
Level: expert
Horizontalists, verticalists, and structuralists: The theory of endogenous money reassessed
In order to address discrimination, we must understand and address its fundamental basis of systemic oppression. Stratification economics goes beyond myopic mainstream conceptualisations of discrimination and recognises the historical, institutional, and structural factors that create and maintain socioeconomic disparities and hierarchies. To critically approach the economics of discrimination, this workshop will focus on stratification economics, a systematic and empirically grounded approach to addressing intergroup inequality (Darity, 2005). Focusing on racial discrimination, we will discuss the core elements of stratification economics, critically evaluate its relevance, and apply these understandings to construct case studies and solutions for change. In our discussions, we will consider an array of topics, including intersecting oppressions, reparative justice, and the role of knowledge production in overcoming injustice and creating a better world.
2022
Level: beginner
Economics of Discrimination
Economics should schematically explain the key elements and main strands of this core part of social life: the actual workings of our economies. This book argues that orthodox, modern neoclassical economics does not fulfil this core task. Standard economics models do not address the real functioning of our market economies, but rather an imagined economy.
2022
Level: beginner
Economics and the Real World
"Bank Underground" is the staff blog of the Bank of England, founded to publish the views and insights of the people working for one of the world's oldest central banks. The blog covers a wide range of macroeconomic topics, mostly linked to the effects of monetary policy, of course, but not all the time. It provides timely, relevant analysis of contemporary challenges in economic policy and is thus often a perfect primer.
Level: advanced
Bank Underground
This paper investigates how the concept of public purpose is used in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). As a common denominator among political scientists, the idea of public purpose is that economic actions should aim at benefiting the majority of the society. However, the concept is to be considered as an ideal of a vague nature, which is highly dependent on societal context and, hence, subject to change over time. MMT stresses that government spending plans should be designed to pursue a certain socio-economic mandate and not to meet any particular financial outcome. The concept of public purpose is heavily used in this theoretical body of thought and often referred to in the context of policy proposals as the ideas of universal job guarantee and banking reform proposals show. MMT scholars use the concept as a pragmatic benchmark against which policies can be assessed. With regards to the definition of public propose, MMT scholars agree that it is dependent on the social-cultural context. Nevertheless, MMT scholars view universal access to material means of survival as universally applicable and in that sense as the lowest possible common denominator.
2020
Level: advanced
Modern Monetary Theory and the public purpose
The article compares market fundamentalism and right-wing populism on the basis of its core patterns of thinking and reasoning. Based on an analysis of important texts in both fields we find many similarities of these two concepts in their "inner images". Thus, we develop a scheme of the similar dual social worlds of right-wing-populism and market fundamentalism and offer some recent examples of market fundamentalism and right-wing populism mutually reinforcing each other or serving as a gateway for each other. We then apply our scheme for the analysis of the recent political developments and its ideological roots in the US under Donald Trump.
2017
Level: advanced
Right-wing populism and market-fundamentalism: Two mutually reinforcing threats to democracy in the 21st century
Modern authors have identified a variety of striking economic patterns, most importantly those involving the distribution of incomes and profit rates. In recent times, the econophysics literature has demonstrated that bottom incomes follow an exponential distribution, top incomes follow a Pareto, profit rates display a tent-shaped distribution. This paper is concerned with the theory underlying various explanations of these phenomena. Traditional econophysics relies on energy-conserving “particle collision” models in which simulation is often used to derive a stationary distribution. Those in the Jaynesian tradition rely on entropy maximization, subject to certain constraints, to infer the final distribution. This paper argues that economic phenomena should be derived as results of explicit economic processes. For instance, the entry and exit process motivated by supply decisions of firms underlies the drift-diffusion form of wage, interest and profit rates arbitrage. These processes give rise to stationary distributions that turn out to be also entropy maximizing. In arbitrage approach, entropy maximization is a result. In the Jaynesian approaches, entropy maximization is the means.
2019
Level: advanced
The Econ in Econophysics
Economics for Emancipation (E4E) is a seven-module introductory curriculum with interactive and participatory workshops. It offers a deep critical dive into the current political economic system, exploration of alternative economic systems, and dynamic tools to dream and build the economy that centers care, relationship, and liberation.
2023
Level: beginner
Economics for Emancipation
It is fiercely debated when exactly the growth set off and what the drivers of Indian growth were. Scott Alexander summarises some of the recent literature on this question, demonstrating that not only the liberalisation policies of the 90s might be the driver of the take-off, but potentially public investments, political developments or cultural shifts.
2019
Level: beginner
Indian Economic Reform: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Completing the Economics of Discrimination module, the students should have acquired knowledge and understanding of the existing similarities and differences of the definition and analysis of discrimination across economic theory and cultural theory.
2021
Level: beginner
Economics of discrimination
After completing the workshop in Post Keynesian Economics participants should be able to describe the main differences and similarities between PKE and other schools of thought.
2021
Level: beginner
Post Keynesian Economics
The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this ground breaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change.
2022
Level: beginner
Climate Change as Class War
To prevent the coronavirus shock to demand precipitating a long-lasting depression, government needs to become short-term payer of last resort.
2020
Level: beginner
Introducing the Payer of Last Resort
Exploring Economics, an open-access e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
2019
Level: advanced
Marx's approach to economics: a claim for subjective praxis
After a brief illustration of sovereign green bonds’ features, this paper describes the market evolution and identifies the main benefits and costs for sovereign issuers. The financial performance of these securities is then analysed.
2021
Level: advanced
Green Bonds: the Sovereign Issuers’ Perspective
Tetteh Hormeku-Ajei, member of the Post-Colonialisms Today Working Group, provides insight on the history of primary commodity export dependence in Africa, and relates it to the difficulties African governments are facing finding necessary resources to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.
2020
Level: beginner
Tracing Primary Commodity Export Dependence
"Despite the rediscovery of the inequality topic by economists as well as other social scientists in recent times, relatively little is known about how economic inequality is mediated to the wider public of ordinary citizens and workers. That is precisely where this book steps in: It draws on a cross-national empirical study to examine how mainstream news media discuss, respond to, and engage with such important and politically sensitive issues and trends.
2020
Level: advanced
Economic Inequality and News Media
Framing borders as an instrument of capital accumulation imperial domination and labor control Walia argues that what is often described as a migrant crisis in Western nations is the outcome for the actual crisis of capitalism conquest and climate change This book shows the displacement of workers in the global …
2021
Level: advanced
Border and Rule
How and by whom are International Labour Standards set? How are they supervised, and how can workers’ organisations use the ILO supervisory mechanisms? What are the key principles of Freedom of Association, the right to strike and Collective Bargaining?
Level: beginner
International Labour Standards: How to Use Them
Written by the Nobel Prize winners in Economics Robert Shiller and George Akerlof, this book shows how deception and manipulation play a big role in the economic behavior of individuals, as well as showing how the assumption of "perfect information" is far away from the truth. Through both quantitative data and stories of how to reduce this noxious phenomenon, the authors paint a pretty different picture of how markets really works in a hyper-communicative scenario like nowadays.
2016
Level: beginner
Phishing for Phools
When Santa Fe Institute Scientists first started working on economics more than thirty years ago, many of their insights, approaches, and tools were considered beyond heterodox. These once-disparaged approaches included network economics, agents of limited rationality, and institutional evolution—all topics that are now increasingly considered mainstream.
2020
Level: expert
Complexity Economics
For many social critics "globalization" is a signpost of “late-capitalism” with the rise of multinational corporations, mass consumption and the multidirectional flows of capital, labor, media, communication, ideologies and social movements across national borders. Feminist analyses of globalization and the gendered and sexualized permutations of these phenomena offer a critical stance for theorizing these processes, and for studying their complex articulations across time and space.
Level: advanced
Feminist Inroads in Epistemology, Method, and Theory
This lecture offers a general and introductory overview of the theory of racial capitalism, focusing on the origins of racial capitalism and some of the debates it has generated.
2021
Level: beginner
Introduction to Racial Capitalism
In this clear and accessible book, an eminent political scientist offers a jargon-free introduction to the market system for all readers, with or without a background in economics
2002
Level: advanced
The Market System
Economics After the Crisis is an introductory economics textbook, covering key topics in micro and macro economics. However, this book differs from other introductory economics textbooks in the perspective it takes, and it incorporates issues that are presently underserved by existing textbooks on the market. This book offers an introduction to economics that takes into account criticisms of the orthodox approach, and which acknowledges the role that this largely Western approach has played in the current global financial and economic crisis.
2014
Level: advanced
Economics After the Crisis
Finance at the Threshold offers a unique perspective from an English economic and monetary historian. In it the author asks: Why did the banks stop lending to one another, and why now? Was it merely a matter of over-loose credit due to the relaxation of traditional prudence, or did global finance find itself at its limits?
2016
Level: advanced
Finance at the Threshold
This classic text offers a broader intellectual foundation than traditional principles textbooks. It introduces students to both traditional economic views and their progressive critique.
2015
Level: advanced
Economics
Even if men were perceived as the main protagonists of the Greek crisis, the crisis had a deep impact on disadvantaged groups, in particular migrant women working as domestic labourers. The debate presents the particular impact on migrant women of the downturn and furthermore discusses how migrant struggles and other emancipatory movements impacted the politics of crisis. The first minutes of the video are in German, but the moderator switches to English.
2015
Level: beginner
Invisible women? Crisis, gender and migration in Greece 2015

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