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In this one-on-one interview, co-host Gerardo Serra talks with Felwine Sarr, author of Afrotopia (2016) and professor of economics at Gaston Berger University in Senegal. Topics include the relevance (or lack thereof) of development economics to conditions in African economies, the significance of African philosophy for thinking about the economic problems of the continent, and the status of the field of history of economic thought in Africa.
Smith and Marx Walk into a Bar - A History of Economics Podcast
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.
The Econ in Econophysics
Economists like to base their theories on individual decision making. Individuals, the idea goes, have their own interests and preferences, and if we don’t include these in our theory we can’t be sure how people will react to changes in their economic circumstances and policy. While there may be social influences, in an important sense the buck stops with individuals. Understanding how individuals process information to come to decisions about their health, wealth and happiness is crucial. You can count me as someone who thinks that on the whole, this is quite a sensible view.
Decision by Sampling, or ‘Psychologists Reclaim Their Turf’
This brief note explores the possibility of working towards an enlarged self-definition of economics through economists’ study and appreciation of economic sociology. Common ground between economic sociology and heterodox economics is explored, and some of Richard Sennett’s ideas are used as prompts to raise some pertinent and hopefully interesting questions about economics. In particular, the note revisits the question of whether there is a possibility of changing our understanding of what kind of social scientific work falls within the domain of economics proper once we start critically engaging with work conventionally considered to be outside of that domain. In part, the note is intended to offer undergraduate students in economics – and possibly even those further down the road in their education – food for thought about what constitutes economics.
On the Possibility of an Enlarged Self-Definition of Economics
This blogpost discusses the bias the Economics discipline has towards Africa. It points out how important conferences on issues regarding Africa take place in Western countries at the expense of those based in Africa.
Economics has an Africa Problem
Mark Carney explains how we have come to esteem financial value over human value and how we have gone from market economies to market societies, how economic theory foundation affect the society as a whole, how we understand our world today and ultimately how this affects our lives.
How We Get What We Value
Yao Graham, coordinator of Third World Network- Africa, reflects on lessons learned from past Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), specifically as they relate to the Post-Cotonou Agreement.
Lessons From Economic Partnership Agreements to the Post- Cotonou Framework
This is a hands on four chapter course to learn how to better understand and act when faced with complex situations By the end of the course students will be able to take a story from the news describe what makes the situation complex and identify opportunities for effective action …
Thinking Complexity
In this article, Jihen Chandoul discusses the importance of food sovereignty in Africa, reflecting on the continent’s early post independence movements for self sufficiency.
Food and the Struggle for Africa’s Sovereignty
Sporting events can be seen as controlled, real-world, miniature laboratory environments, approaching the idea of “holding other things equal” when exploring the implications of decisions, incentives, and constraints in a competitive setting (Goff and Tollison 1990, Torgler 2009). Thus, a growing number of studies have used sports data to study decision-making questions that have guided behavioral economics literature.
Sport as a Behavioral Economics Lab
In this interview Gerd Gigerenzer place bounded rationality into the context of a larger development in thinking about what rationality is He touches on unbounded rationality which remains overrepresented and popular in neoclassical economics he explains different interpretations of bounded rationality and concludes with an ecological interpretation of rationality He …
Gerd Gigerenzer - Bounded Rationality
The goal of this brief report is to put in one place some of the works that have come out of the movement to reform economics education. True to their training, the student movement for pluralism in economics education has been marked by an impressive amount of research: both on economics education itself and on more topical subjects within economics.
Mapping Pluralist Research - An overview of research within the student movement for pluralism in economics
In this first episode of the anti-recommendation podcast "If books could kill"-Podcast, the hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri point out some of the countless flaws of "Freakonomics", critising its shallowness, oversimplification and leaning towards a conservative reading of some large societal issues.
Freakonomics
Eco-modernisation’s promise that technological fixes will provide us with the efficiency we need to decouple environmental burdens from economic growth suggests that business-as-usual can continue. Today’s guest Timothée Parrique is the best to explain why this is not happening and why relying solely on technological solutions is like betting on green zero in roulette.
Why will technology not save our souls?
This self-paced free course by Perry Merhling guides you to his "Money View" approach that integrates the fields of economics and finance. The course can easily be understood by people interested people without technical economic knowledge or training as it is primarily a tool for analysis.
Economics of Money and Banking
In this course you will study the different facets of human development in topics such as education health gender the family land relations risk informal and formal norms public policy and institutions While studying each of these topics we will delve into the following questions What determines the decisions of …
Foundations of Development Policy: Advanced Development Economics
What does GDP measure? How was it constructed and how did it become so important? What are alternatives? A historical introduction into the critique of GDP as measure of economic welfare.
Dirk Philipsen on GDP
What is universal basic income? This video gives a first, short introduction.
What is Universal Basic Income?
"his course introduces the complex, but critical, concepts of sustainability and resilience and examines your impact on our environment."
Sustainability, Resilience, and Society
In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future's unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come.
Imagined Futures
The current global financial system may not withstand the next global financial crisis. In order to promote the resilience and stability of our global financial system against future shocks and crises, a fundamental reconceptualisation of financial regulation is necessary. This reconceptualisation must begin with a deep understanding of how today's financial markets, regulatory initiatives and laws operate and interact at the global level.
Reconceptualising Global Finance and its Regulation
How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development.
Kicking Away the Ladder
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
The complex economic problems of the 21st century require a pluralist, real-world oriented and innovative discipline of economics that is capable of addressing and teaching these issues to students. This volume is a state-of-the-art compilation of diverse, innovative and international perspectives on the rationales for and pathways towards pluralist economics teaching.
Advancing Pluralism in Teaching Economics
Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations provided the first, most influential and lasting explanation of the workings of modern economics. But with his focus on "the market" as the best mechanism for producing and distributing the necessities of life, Smith's concepts only told part of the story, leading to flawed economic models that devalue activities that fall outside of the market's parameters of buying and selling.
The Real Wealth of Nations
A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
This book is a collection of Steve Keen's influential papers published over the last fifteen years. The topics covered include methodology, microeconomics, and the monetary approach to macroeconomics that Keen - along with many other non-mainstream economists - has been developing.
Developing an Economics for the Post-crisis World
Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected?In "Capitalism in the Web of Life", Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today's global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature.
Capitalism in the Web of Life
More than a century after Hartley Withers's "The Meaning of Money" and 80 years after Keynes's "Treatise on Money", the fundamentals of how banks create money still needs explaining and this book meets that need with clear exposition and expert marshalling of the relevant facts.
Where Does Money Come From?
In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively “codes” certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital—and lawyers are the keepers of the code.
The Code of Capital
This book discusses the relationship between pluralist economics and the case study method of teaching, advocating the complimentary use of both to advance economics education. Using a multi-paradigmatic philosophical frame of analysis, the book discusses the philosophical, methodological, and practical aspects of the case study method while drawing comparisons with those of the more commonly used lecture method.
Case Method and Pluralist Economics
The video gives a short explanation of Max Weber's treatment of the protestant work ethic as the explanatory factor for the development of capitalism.
An Introduction to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic - A Macat Sociology Analysis
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