RETHINK
ECONOMICS
RETHINK
ECONOMICS
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297 results

An essay of the writing workshop on Nigeria’s Readiness for and the Effect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
2020
Level: advanced
The Role of Women in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
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.
2017
Level: beginner
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.
2019
Level: beginner
The power of economic textbooks: A discourse analysis
The course will teach students to analyze the goals, implementation, and outcomes of economic policy.
2019
Level: advanced
Advanced Economic Policy
The premise of this workshop is that we, as knowledge producers - especially within westernized universities (Grosfoguel, 2013), are significantly implicated in neoliberal imaginaries that are often in service of hierarchical, binary, competitive and linear narratives of growth as civilizational progress.
2021
Level: beginner
Decolonizing Economics
This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of work-related gender issues and to enable students to analyze the issues using the tools of economics.
2015
Level: beginner
Women, Men, & Work
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
This introductory text explores the political economy of water by defining the subject and examining its key issues.
2025
Level: beginner
The political economy of water
This course focus on the behaviour of individuals from an pluralist economic and an interdisciplinary bevavioural science apprach.
2020
Level: advanced
Actors, Behaviours and Decision Processes
This course will survey contemporary heterodox approaches to economic research, both from a microeconomic and a macroeconomic perspective. Topics will be treated from a general, critical, and mathematical standpoint.
2021
Level: advanced
Heterodox Approaches to Economics
This chapter discusses the role of gender in economic relations, processes, and outcomes. Gender differences in economic outcomes such as labor force participation and wages have received growing attention from economists in the last several decades – a positive and much needed development in economic thinking.
2016
Level: beginner
Illuminating the role of gender in the economy
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 takes a critical perspective on the pursuit of growth as the solution for providing for environmental sustainability and economic stability in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing from the framework of dependency theory and presenting brief insights into European core-periphery relations the author then argues for the implementation of an alternative strategy to development that is built around the concept of self-reliance.
2018
Level: advanced
Dependency in Central and Eastern Europe - Self-reliance and the need to move beyond 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
In this essay the author reviews empirical studies in economics that analyze factors behind the rise of nationalist and populist parties in Western countries. He stresses that economic factors (e.g., trade shocks and economic crisis) play a crucial role in the rise of populist parties; however, the discussion of mechanisms driving this trend remains unsatisfying
2019
Level: advanced
The Economics of Populism in the Present
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
Whether a black swan or a scapegoat, Covid-19 is an extraordinary event. Declared by the WHO as a pandemic, Covid-19 has given birth to the concept of the economic “sudden stop.” We need extraordinary measures to contain it.
2020
Level: beginner
Triggering a Global Financial Crisis: Covid-19 as the Last Straw
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.
2017
Level: advanced
The Complexity of Economies and Pluralism in Economics
The course will teach students to analyze the goals, implementation, and outcomes of economic policy.
2018
Level: advanced
Advanced Economic Policy 2
The outbreak of COVID-19 has substantially accelerated the digitalization of the economy. Yet, this unprecedented growth of digital technology brought novel challenges to the labour market. Rise in income inequalities and precarious working conditions or polarization of jobs. In this essay, we try to assess what tools to use to counter these trends.
2021
Level: beginner
Post-pandemic future of work - How does digitization impact labour?
This chapter by the Centre of Economy Studies provides a map through the complex jungle of economic theories. It provides key insights and ideas for thirteen core topics in economics, organised by selecting the most relevant theoretical approaches per topic and contrasting them with each other.
2021
Level: beginner
Pragmatic Pluralism
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.
2020
Level: beginner
Decision by Sampling, or ‘Psychologists Reclaim Their Turf’
Professor Joseph Aldy from Harvard Kennedy School gives us some insights about how economics can set the balance between policymakers, scientists, employers and citizens.
2020
Level: beginner
Can Economics save the Environment?
This report by the 'Institute for Global Prosperity' explores the hypothesis that strengthening and extending universal services is an effective way of tackling poverty and improving wellbeing for all.
2019
Level: beginner
Universal Basic Services: Theory and Practice
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
“Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses1.” This is how Lionel Robbins came to define economics in the early 1930s and there is a good chance that many of you heard a variant of this definition in your first Economics 101 lecture.
2021
Level: beginner
What is “Economics”?
In this overview paper, Laura Porak reviews the history of industrial policy in the European Union before the background of a Cultural Political Economy approach.
2023
Level: beginner
History of Industrial Policy in the EU
Fabian Georgi analyses how migration and borders are connected to capitalism.
2024
Level: advanced
Recruiting skilled labour, while closing borders? The connection between migration, border regimes and capitalism
Education policy seeks to ensure equality in access, equality within the classroom and in teaching- learning processes, and equality in outcomes. This course encourages students to assess and evaluate the extent to which these objectives are met in practice and the ways in which educational outcomes are shaped by, as well as alter, gendered social norms.
Level: beginner
Education, Gender and Development
Green Growth has been increasingly discussed as a solution to the socio-ecological crisis. But can economic growth be sustainable at all?
2022
Level: beginner
Is Green Growth a myth?
The book criticizes neoclassical climate economics in the tradition of William Nordhaus. It explains why this kind of thinking is misleading and why neoclassical climate economics asks the wrong questions.
2020
Level: advanced
Climate Economics
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

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