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125 results

In the history of the social sciences, few individuals have exerted as much influence as has Jeremy Bentham. His attempt to become “the Newton of morals” has left a marked impression upon the methodology and form of analysis that social sciences like economics and political science have chosen as modus operandi.
2020
Level: advanced
Bentham’s Two Sovereign Masters - Examining Bentham’s Influence on the Social Sciences
This module examines current socio-political issues through the lens of pluralism, that is pluralism of theory, pluralism of method and interdisciplinary pluralism
2020
Level: beginner
Pluralist Economic Analysis
Neoclassical economics focuses on the allocation of scarce resources. Economic analysis is mainly concerned with determining the efficient allocation of resources in order to increase welfare.
Neoclassical Economics
Complexity economics focuses on interactions and interdependencies between individuals and structures in economic systems. Those are systems of organised complexity. High importance is given to the analysis of networks.
Complexity Economics
This course attempts to explain the role and the importance of the financial system in the global economy. Rather than separating off the financial world from the rest of the economy, financial equilibrium is studied as an extension of economic equilibrium. The course also gives a picture of the kind of thinking and analysis done by hedge funds.
2009
Level: beginner
Financial Theory
This syllabus provides an overview of the content of the Philosophy and Economics course at the University of Waterloo.
2019
Level: beginner
Philosophy and Economics
A comprehensive account of how government deficits and debt drive inflation
2023
Level: advanced
The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level
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.
2019
Level: advanced
A fresh perspective to economic theory: Social preferences and their impact on gender and policy
What influence do changes in tax policy or state decisions on expenditure have on economic growth? For decades, this question has been controversially debated.
2020
Level: advanced
What is the fiscal multiplier and why is it so controversial?
This course provides future change makers in public and private sectors with a comprehensive overview on the structures and actors that shape markets.
2019
Level: beginner
The Governance of Markets in Challenging Times: From Classic Authors to New Approaches
The objective of the course is to explore the main strengths and weaknesses of orthodox and heterodox paradigms within development economics.
2019
Level: beginner
Issues in Development Economics
Exploring Economics, an open-access e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
2021
Level: beginner
The Political Economy of Inequalities
This chapter by the Centre for Economy Studies explores how courses on the history of economic thought and methods could look if they were pluralist and interdisciplinary.
2021
Level: beginner
Rethinking the History of Economic Thought & Methods
Post-Keynesians focus on the analysis of capitalist economies, perceived as highly productive, but unstable and conflictive systems. Economic activity is determined by effective demand, which is typically insufficient to generate full employment and full utilisation of capacity.
Post-Keynesian Economics
For a long time, price controls were considered taboo, as neoliberal economic theory assumes that prices are supposedly formed freely by supply and demand. But especially in times of crisis, the state must intervene and cap prices to protect wage earners from excessive burdens. However, the how matters.
2025
Level: beginner
Price Controls Against Inflation
Donald Trump won in 2016 largely because enough voters in three states, all in the Rustbelt, which had voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, switched their electoral votes from Democratic to Republican.
2019
Level: beginner
The Rise of Trumpism
In this short podcast, Naomi Fowler, the Tax Justice Network's creative strategist, discusses how the laws made by those who profited from slavery and the empire and, the extractive business models of the major financial sector continue to impoverish some of the poorest nations.
2020
Level: beginner
Systemic racism, reparations and tax justice
The article addresses the current debate on democratic economic planning and the question of how and by which instruments a post-capitalist planning system, embedded in a broader agenda of macroeconomic transformation, can be developed.
2025
Level: advanced
On Democratic Economic Planning and Macroeconomic Transformation
The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen´s text analyzes three main figures in social sciences and the relation between them: the Italian economist Piero Sraffa, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Italian politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci.
2003
Level: advanced
Sraffa, Wittgenstein, and Gramsci
After completing the module, participants should have knowledge and understanding about the theory of Critical Political Economy and its basic methods. They should be able to apply central concepts to analyse critical questions regarding the embeddedness of economic relations within broader social, political and ecological relations.
2021
Level: beginner
Marxist Political Economy
p>Twenty-first-century economists will have to understand and improve a post-Cold War world in which no single economic theory or system holds the key to human betterment. Heterodox economists have much to contribute to this effort, as a wave of pluralism spawns new lines of research and new dialogues among non-mainstream economists.
2008
Level: advanced
Future Directions for Heterodox Economics
This brief but comprehensive account of the Post Keynesian approach to economic theory and policy is ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in economics, public policy and other social sciences. Clear, non-technical and with a strong policy focus, it will also appeal to all of those who are dissatisfied with mainstream economics and wish to explore the alternatives.
2015
Level: advanced
Advanced Introduction to Post Keynesian Economics
Big challenges lie ahead for our society: increased automation of work, and the threat of catastrophic climate change. But so, too, are the huge possibilities presented by new technology and better ways of organising our economy in the wake of neoliberalism's failure.
2018
Level: advanced
Economics for the Many

In the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land.

The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism—the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, their advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe.

2012
Level: beginner
Zombie Economics
This collection of essays, a supplement to History of Political Economy, brings together prominent scholars from economics, sociology, literature, and history to examine the role of biography and autobiography in the history of economics. The first of its kind, this volume looks at the relevance of first-person accounts to narrative histories of economics.
2007
Level: advanced
Economists' Lives
Until the end of the early 1970s, from a history of economic thought perspective, the mainstream in economics was pluralist, but once neoclassical economics became totally dominant it claimed the mainstream as its own. Since then, alternative views and schools of economics increasingly became minorities in the discipline and were considered 'heterodox'.
2016
Level: advanced
Reclaiming Pluralism in Economics
The age of the contemplative economist-scholar—at home equally in classical languages, economic history, the history of ideas, and mathematical theory—has passed. The history of economics as a subdiscipline has lost touch with the mainstream study of economics. InThe Future of the History of Economics, internationally known scholars from ten countries provide a comparative assessment of the subdiscipline.
2002
Level: advanced
The Future of the History of Economics
Galbraith gives an overview of economic history from the 18th century until the end of the 19th century covering issues such as the industrial revolution the enclosure of the Scottish highlands the Irish famine and the colonization of North America Additionally the ideas of economists such as Smith Ricardo Malthus …
Level: beginner
The Age of Uncertainty Episode 1 - The Prophets and Promise of Classical Capitalism
In this essay, the principle of capital accumulation, as well as the idea of homo economicus as the basis of the growth model, are located and analyzed from a feminist perspective. The sufficiency approach is presented as an alternative to these two economic logics.
2018
Level: beginner
Enough! The Sufficiency Approach and the Limits of Economic Growth
In this essay the author outlines the basis for embracing a post-work agenda, rooted in an emancipatory potential from the domination of waged work, which could help answer both feminist and ecological concerns with work.
2018
Level: beginner
Towards a post-work future: a necessary agenda to reconcile feminist & ecological concerns with work
Approaching the law of nature that determines all forms of economy. The bulk of economic theory addresses the economic process by setting out on a catalogue of aspects, seeking the laws in the aspects and hoping to get together a reliable view of the whole.
2019
Level: advanced
Economic theory, methodology, and secure foundations
It is perhaps fitting that the seriousness of the coronavirus threat hit most of the Western world around the Ides of March, the traditional day of reckoning of outstanding debts in Ancient Rome. After all, problems and imbalances have accumulated in the Western capitalist system over four decades, ostensibly since it took the neoliberal road out of the 1970s crisis and kept going along it, heedless of the crises and problems it led to.
2020
Level: beginner
The Unexpected Reckoning: Coronavirus and Capitalism

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