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381 results
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 …
Making Many Maps: Why We Need an Interested Pluralism in Economics and How to Get There
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?
Inflation in economic theory
Participants should be able to distinguish the strictly non-cooperative (methodological individualist) foundations of traditional neoclassical economics as being couched in self-interested individuals, as well as having basic knowledge of an alternative set of theories based on the primacy cooperation and social norms and extending the breadth of economic analysis beyond exchange.
Cooperative Economics
To explain the pronounced instability of the world economy since the 1970s, the book offers an important and systematic theoretical examination of money and finance.
Political Economy of Money and Finance
The 2007–08 credit crisis and the long recession that followed brutally exposed the economic and social costs of financialization. Understanding what lay behind these events, the rise of “fictitious capital” and its opaque logic, is crucial to grasping the social and political conditions under which we live. Yet, for most people, the operations of the financial system remain shrouded in mystery.
Fictitious Capital
A comprehensive account of how government deficits and debt drive inflation
The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level
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.
Women, Men, & Work
In this ambitious and impressive new book, journalist Howard French seeks to excavate the long elided central importance of the African continent as the “linchpin of the machine of modernity.” In the story of modernity, he writes, the role of Africa is diminished, trivialized, and erased, and by filling in some gaps in this story, he retells the story of modernity.
Born in Blackness
This course will fundamentally ask whether we can, or even should use the word ‘decolonising’ in our pursuit of a better economics?
Decolonising Economics?
The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the deep structural rifts in modern capitalist economies. It has exposed and exacerbated the long-lasting systemic inequalities in income, wealth, healthcare, housing, and other aspects of economic success across a variety of dimensions including class, gender, race, regions, and nations. This workshop explores the causes of economic inequality in contemporary capitalist economies and its consequences for the economy and society in the post-pandemic reality, as well as what steps can be taken to alleviate economic inequality in the future. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary insights, the workshop encourages you to reflect on your personal experiences of inequality and aims to challenge the way in which the issue is typically approached in economics.
Inequality in the Post-pandemic Era
This syllabus provides an overview of the contents of the course "Understanding Economic Models" at the University of Helsinki.
Understanding Economic Models
Capitalism is dissolving boundaries - not only in the sense of ever-expanding global trade flows, but also in the concrete everyday working lives of individuals. What implications does this have for our understanding of freedom, work and borders?
Capitalism & Boundaries
Economic theory must distinguish between publicly owned and privately owned property if it is to account for the effect of institutions on the behavior of individuals. Careful study of the theories of Marxists and the real-world experience in the Soviet economy offer important lessons and insight for economic modeling and the ongoing development of theory. In this course, Marxist/Leninist theory and Soviet reality will be studied with an open mind, and with the goal of taking lessons from the case study. To what extent was the Soviet economy an accurate expression of Marxist theory? If Marxism were tried somewhere else would the results be the same?
Economic History of the Soviet Union
What is economics? What can - and can't - it explain about the world? Why does it matter?
Economics: The User's Guide
Transition from central planning to a market economy, involving large-scale institutional change and reforms at all levels, is often described as the greatest social science experiment in modern times.
Handbook of the Economics and Political Economy of Transition
The concept of financialisation has undergone a similar career as ‘globalisation’, ‘neoliberalism’ or even ‘capitalism’, in the course of which it changed from the explanandum to the explanans; the process of financialisation is taken for granted, while the concrete historical and empirical causal conditions of its realisation and perpetuation are being moved into the background.
A holistic theory of financialisation
Mainstream inflation theories in economics do little to explain the recent acceleration in price increases. The associated economic policy recommendations further increase the misery of low-income groups.
The inflation conundrum
Philosophy of Economics: A Contemporary Introduction is the first systematic textbook in the philosophy of economics introduces to the epistemological, metaphysical and ethical problems that arise in economics, and presents detailed discussions of the solutions that have been offered.
Philosophy of Economics
In this volume, Katz offers a detailed summary of the foundations, evolutions and approaches of Dependency Theory in Latin America, focusing on the regional interpretations of Marxism, Developmentalism and World-Systems Theory.
Dependency Theory After Fifty Years
This article outlines the fundamental challenges of democratically planned economies and categorises proposed models into six groups, each of which approaches planning and coordination at different levels of authority and between myriad economic units in a particular way, taking into account efficiency as well as democratic principles and environmental and social sustainability. Through a classification system based on decision-making authority and mediation mechanisms, the article provides a framework for understanding and comparing these models. By examining their different approaches, it offers insights into the complexities and potential paths of democratically planned economies in the 21st century.
Rethinking Democratic Economic Planning: An Overview
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.
Rethinking the History of Economic Thought & Methods
Usually, Critical Theory and Economics are, for better or worse, no longer seen to be in a continuum. This article by Lukas Meisner serves as an introduction to Critical Theory for all (heterodox) economists, who want to understand and explain what they can, otherwise, just state and describe.
Critical Theory for Heterodox Economists: Questioning the Premises of Supply and Demand
This introductory text explores the political economy of water by defining the subject and examining its key issues.
The political economy of water
Die Welt verändern, ohne die Macht zu übernehmen – dieser Buchtitel aus dem Jahr 2002 steht emblematisch für ein Verhältnis zur Macht, das in Teilen der Linken lange Zeit vorherrschend war. Der Autor des Buches, John Holloway, war selbst Teil der Weltsozialforen-Bewegung und stellte sich entschieden gegen herkömmliche Vorstellungen linker Gegenmacht, etwa im Sinne des Aufbaus einer linken Massenpartei. Aus derselben Zeit stammt auch das Konzept der «Multitude» aus der Feder von Michael Hardt und Antonio Negri. Es richtete sich gegen den identitären Begriff eines «Volkes», und ebenso gegen eine politische Bezugnahme auf die «Arbeiter*innenklasse». Diesen politischen Subjekten wurde eine Vielfalt widerständiger, global verteilter Praktiken und Gruppierungen entgegengestellt, die sich jedoch nicht vereinheitlichen ließen. Das Verhältnis dieser Multitude zur Erringung von Macht wurde offengelassen.
Die Macht übernehmen und die Welt verändern?
Extractivism is a development model based on exploiting and exporting raw materials. It is fundamental to reproducing entire societies, mainly in the Global South, while generating manifold dilemmas. This text situates extractivism within the broader landscape of global economic asymmetries, emphasizing the role of rents—excess revenues generated from resource extraction due to international price differentials—as a central analytical lens.
The Political Economy of Extractivism
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.
Price Controls Against Inflation
An article in the New York Times from early 2025 suggests that the political influence of mainstream economics is declining. While economists have been highly influential in supporting and shaping free-market policies in recent decades, their expertise has become less relevant during intensified economic crises that necessitate state interventions.
The Strange Non-Death of Mainstream Economics
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?
The Project of Pluralism
The global economic and political order is undergoing rapid and profound transformation. We are witnessing a far-reaching "organic" crisis of the global economic world order, which may have started with the financial crisis of 2007/2008 but now enters a new, much more dynamic phase.
Towards a New Economics of Collapse and Construction
Maria Kader provides an overview of the ECB's crisis policies in recent years. She outlines the measures taken, their effects, and their shortcomings.
The European Central Bank in a State of Crisis: Policies, Effects and Downsides
What constitutes the dominance of the US dollar, what it provides for the US and the rest of the world, why it is constantly questioned, and what the future might hold for the dollar
How the International Reserve Currency System Works – and Whether the End of Dollar Hegemony is Imminent
The foundational economy is a concept which describes the infrastructure of everyday life, encompassing all essential services like utilities or healthcare that people require for wellbeing. This contribution provides an overview of foundational thinking.
The foundational economy: Focusing on what matters
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