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Introduction Economics is by necessity a multi paradigmatic science Several theoretical structures exist side by side and each theory can never be more than a partial theory Rothschild 1999 Likening scientific work to the self coordinating invisible hand of the market Michael Polanyi cautioned strongly against centralized attempts to steer …
2021
Level: beginner
Making Many Maps: Why We Need an Interested Pluralism in Economics and How to Get There
That’s why it is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth, to revise our economic thinking for the 21st century. In Doughnut Economics, she sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does.
2017
Level: beginner
Doughnut Economics
Due to the IMF’s focus on gender budgeting, this essay will mainly examine its gender budgeting recommendations as an example of its general inclination towards gender issues and its conception of gender equality. What does the IMF’s focus on gender equality really mean from a critical feminist perspective? What are its main objectives? What does it seek to change and to maintain? What concept or idea of women does it follow and what are the underlying theoretical foundations?
2017
Level: beginner
The Gender strategy of the IMF: The way to go towards gender equality or a mere instrumentalisation of feminism?
Dr. Katherine Trebeck explains some reasons why we should believe the future of the economy should be a wellbeing economy.
2020
Level: beginner
Why the Future Economy has to be a Wellbeing Economy
What’s inflation? Why is it relevant? And is there an agreed theory about its roots and causes, or is it a contentious concept? That’s what this text is all about: We define what inflation actually means before we delve into the theoretical debate with an interdisciplinary and pluralist approach: What gives rise to it, what factors might influence it, and, consequently, what might be done about it?
2021
Level: beginner
Inflation in economic theory
In this essay the author elaborates on the EU's perspective on the fast growing sector of the platform economy.
2019
Level: beginner
Sharing is Caring? On the EU- Narrative on Platform Economy
In this essay the authors argue for a wider concept of care work that includes community building, civic engagement and environmental activism. On the basis of the case of Cargonomia, a grassroot initiative in Budapest, they show that such a wider concept of care work could allow for different narratives that promote sustainable lifestyles with a milder environmental and social impact on the planet and its communities.
2019
Level: beginner
Reimagining the world of (care)work: the case of Cargonomia
In 18th century Europe figures such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Friedrich List and Jean Baptiste Colbert developed theories regarding international trade, which either embraced free trade seeing it as a positive sum game or recommended more cautious and strategic approaches to trade seeing it as a potential danger and a rivalry and often as a zero-sum game. What about today?
2016
Level: beginner
Free trade in economic theories
This video provides a brief introduction to post-keynesian economics and how the school of thought would tackle climate change.
2020
Level: beginner
Clips on Climate: Postkeynesian Economics
The term "de-risking" can be seen as one element of a strategy aimed at discursively reframing the trade policy confrontation with China. This confrontation has mainly been driven by the US in recent years and received initially cautious, but later growing support from the EU.
2023
Level: beginner
De-risking, de-coupling, de-globalization?
Why has heterodox economics not been more successful in making inroads into the mainstream? And why has “pluralist economics,” the most prominent alternative paradigm to mainstream economics, not been more successful in changing the curriculum?
2025
Level: advanced
The Project of Pluralism
Marxian Political Economy focuses on the exploitation of labour by capital. The economy is not conceived as consisting of neutral transactions for exchange and cooperation, but instead as having developed historically out of asymmetric distributions of power, ideology and social conflicts.
Marxian Political Economy
In this podcast, Nalia Kabeer talks about her work, criticising the way in which Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) is adopted as a sole form of impact assessment. At the beginning of the talk, she briefly describes The Ultra Poor Project (the context of her study), RCTs and its critiques (such as lack of acknowledgement of human agency, heterogeneity, and social context); also, the problem that most RCTs practitioners do not allow for qualitative research conducted in an integrated way as it might cause their studies “being contaminated.”
2019
Level: beginner
Naila Kabeer on Why Randomized Controlled Trials need to include Human Agency
Jo Michell discusses some key implications of climate change regarding the standard policy prescriptions of Post-Keynesian economics, particularly relating to the possible necessity of consumption constraints and the presence of recurrent inflation.
2022
Level: beginner
Macroeconomic Policy Coordination: A New Approach for the End of Abundance
The ecological crisis challenges the ways to understand the links between the environment, society, and the economy. To train students to be able to think critically about the issues associated with the crisis, it is important to take multiple perspectives into account. This lecture by Economy Studies can help students develop a familiarity with the different schools of thought and conceptions that exist within economics.
2022
Level: beginner
Perspectives on the Environment - Economy Studies
Colonial Global Economy is a module of the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project and examines the ongoing significance of colonial relations in the structure of the global economy It consists of 7 introductory lectures which range between 17 and 39 minutes of length In addition further readings resources and questions for …
2020
Level: beginner
Colonial Global Economy
Economics: A New Introduction provides a fresh introduction to real economics. Highlighting the complex and changing nature of economic activity, this wide-ranging text employs a pragmatic mix of old and new methods to examine the role of values and theoretical beliefs in economic life and in economists’ understanding of it.
1999
Level: beginner
Economics
This open access book presents an alternative to capitalism and state socialism through the modelling of a post-market and post-state utopia based on an upscaling of the commons, feminist political economy and democratic and council-based planning approaches.
2022
Level: beginner
Make Capitalism History
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
This book examines how grassroots groups, municipalities and radical crypto-entrepreneurs are remaking money by designing and organising complementary currencies.
2025
Level: beginner
Remaking Money for a Sustainable Future
Steve Keen analyses how mainstream economics fails when confronted with the covid-19-pandemic. Mainstream economics has propagated the dismantling of the state and the globalization of production - both of which make the crisis now so devastating. More fundamentally, mainstream economics deals with market systems, when what is needed to limit the virus’s spread is a command system.
2020
Level: beginner
The Coronavirus and the End of Economics
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
2021
Level: beginner
Unemployment in Nigeria: Policy Review and Recommendations
What made the false assumption that saving the economy at all cost during a pandemic so popular? This paper discusses different pathways through the COVID-19 pandemic at national and international level, and their consequences on the health of citizens and their economies.
2021
Level: beginner
How not to save the economy? The interplay of economics and health during the COVID-19 pandemic
Institutional economics focuses on the role of social institutions in terms of laws or contracts, but also those of social norms and patterns of human behaviour that are connected to the social organisation of production, distribution and consumption in the economy.
Institutionalist Economics
The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) is rapidly spreading around the world. The real economy is simultaneously hit by a supply shock and a demand shock by the spread of coronavirus. Such a twin shock is a rare phenomenon in recent economic history.
2020
Level: beginner
How to Manage the Economic Fallout of the Coronavirus
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
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
The Great Recession 2.0 is unfolding before our very eyes. It is still in its early phase. But dynamics have been set in motion that are not easily stopped, or even slowed. If the virus effect were resolved by early summer—as some politicians wishfully believe—the economic dynamics set in motion would still continue. The US and global economies have been seriously ‘wounded’ and will not recover easily or soon. Those who believe it will be a ‘V-shape’ recovery are deluding themselves. Economists among them should know better but are among the most confused. They only need to look at historical parallels to convince themselves otherwise.
2020
Level: beginner
Origins & Emergence of the 2020 Great Recession in the US Economy
Feminist economics is a key component of the movement for pluralism in economics and one that has, to some extent, been acknowledged by the mainstream of the profession. It seeks to highlight issues which affect women because (it claims) they have not traditionally been recognised in a field dominated by men. On top of this, it seeks to carve out a space for women in the discipline, both for intrinsic reasons of fairness and diversity and because it means that women’s issues are more likely to be highlighted going forward.
2020
Level: beginner
Why Feminist Economics is Necessary
Feminist economics focuses on the interdependencies of gender relations and the economy. Care work and the partly non-market mediated reproduction sphere are particularly emphasised by feminist economics.
Feminist Economics
Is degrowth bad economics To properly answer this question it is essential to understand what economic growth really is The term growth is often associated with an increase in wealth a term loosely defined but according to the degrowth movement economic growth is a narrower concept only describing an increase …
2022
Level: beginner
Is prosperous degrowth feasible?
The podcast discusses how to deal with the rising inflation and presents a comparative perspective between the US and the EMU. Basically the speakers discuss whether we are heading to a stagflation in Europe similar to the 1970s and they compare the macroeconomic dynamics in the United States vs. the EMU.
2022
Level: advanced
Taming inflation? What are the implications of prolonged inflation?

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