✕
921 results
An essay of the writing workshop on contemporary issues in the field of Nigerian economics: In Nigeria, it appears that there is nothing in the constitution, which excludes the participation of women in politics. Yet, when it comes to actual practice, there is extensive discrimination. The under-representation of women in political participation gained root due to the patriarchal practice inherent in our society, much of which were obvious from pre-colonial era till date.
Women Participation – Women Contribution to Economics and Politics
In this book, distinguished economist Edith Kuiper shows us that the history of economic thought is just that, a his-story, by telling the herstory of economic thought from the perspective of women economic writers and economists. Although some of these women were well known in their time, they were excluded from most of academic economics, and, over the past centuries, their work has been neglected, forgotten, and thus become invisible.
A Herstory 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
How do people make decisions? There is a class of models in psychology which seek to answer this question but have received scant attention in economics despite some clear empirical successes. In a previous post I discussed one of these, Decision by Sampling, and this post will look at another: the so-called Fast and Frugal heuristics pioneered by the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. Here the individual seeks out sufficient information to make a reasonable decision. They are ‘fast’ because they do not require massive computational effort to make a decision so can be done in seconds, and they are ‘frugal’ because they use as little information as possible to make the decision effectively.
Bounded Rationality: the Case of ‘Fast and Frugal’ Heuristics
The notion that the demand and supply side are independent is a key feature of textbook undergraduate economics and of modern macroeconomic models. Economic output is thought to be constrained by the productive capabilities of the economy - the ‘supply-side' - through technology, demographics and capital investment. In the short run a boost in demand may increase GDP and employment due to frictions such as sticky wages, but over the long-term successive rises in demand without corresponding improvements on the supply side can only create inflation as the economy reaches capacity. In this post I will explore the alternative idea of demand-led growth, where an increase in demand can translate into long-run supply side gains. This theory is most commonly associated with post-Keynesian economics, though it has been increasingly recognised in the mainstream literature.
It’s Demand All the Way Down
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven digs into the Eurocentric nature of economics and the role dependency theory could play in decolonizing it.
Dependency Theory & the Decolonization of Economics
In the interview, Robert Skidelsky discusses the emergence of political influence of a certain school of economic thought and how the success of an economic theory depends on the power relations in the society. He introduces the historical example of Keynesian economics and its replacement by liberal economic theory and policy in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and transfers this historical case to the dominant paradigm of austerity policies in the Europe as response to rising public debts caused by the Financial Crisis. He contrasts austerity policies with a Keynesian approach. Furthermore, he relates the targets of policy to the underlying power structures, for example when not the reduction of unemployment but the protection of financial capital is politically addressed.
Economics and Political Power during the Crisis
Caring activities are one central element of feminist economists' analysis – also since in particular unremunerated work is a blind spot in mainstream economics and most other economic paradigms. Those focus on the market sphere: activities are considered as productive and as real labour if they are remunerated and market-intermediated. Goods and services are considered as labour if they create a value which can be traded on the market. Feminist Economics remarks that this perspective creates certain dichotomies and consequent devaluations: unproductive – productive; private – public; unpaid – remunerated OR paid less – well paid; female – male; soft work – hard work; caring – rationality.
Reproductive Labour and Care
Feminist economist Nancy Folbre presents a historical analysis of the interrelated development of Patriarchy and Capitalism. She describes the role of women in the reproduction of labour, their “specialization” in care and their changing involvement in the labour market. Folbre argues that capitalism weakens patriarchy but at the same time relies on unpaid caring activities.
Women's Work and the Limits of Capitalism
In this radio program, the anthropologist David Graeber, explores the history of debt in (currently) 12 episodes. The program is based on his book Debt: The First 5000 Years. First, Graeber asks the questions of how debt and money are characterized, which meaning and roles they had in different historic episodes and how they were interrelated. In the most recent episodes, Graeber elaborates on how debt shaped society. He argues that debt had a different moral status in different times of history, one session analyses the current financial and economic crisis and the role of credit in this historical context.
Promises, Promises: A history of debt
In this interview, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett presents her view on how "the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite, and how their consumer habits affect us all".
A Theory of the Aspirational Class
What is game theory? Game theory is a way of thinking about strategic interactions between people, which makes it a crucial component of economics, political science, international relations, psychology and a variety of other disciplines that deal with the complexities of human interaction in decision making.
An Introduction to Game Theory in Public Policy
Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to follow through on new year’s resolutions, such as to exercise more or to start saving more money towards retirement? The agent that most traditional economic models are based on would not struggle to keep up these resolutions. These agents are referred to as homo economicus.
Homo Economicus: Why are new year’s resolutions so difficult to maintain and economic models so bad at predicting our behaviour?
The MINE website explores the interplay between nature and economy. Focusing on such fundamental concepts as time, thermodynamics, evolution, homo politicus and justice, a new outline of economic activity emerges within nature. The dominant approach of Mainstream Economics, which considers nature as a subsystem of the economy, is thus replaced by a broader and more integrated framework. The visual map and its links between concepts provides an orientation. The visitor can approach the content from their own starting point and follow their own path to discovery. Each concept starts with the historical background and moves on through theory and practice.
The research behind MINE began in the 1970s at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in an interdisciplinary group spearheaded by Professor Malte Faber, including scientists from economics to mathematics, physics and philosophy. The research has contributed to the field of Ecological Economics.
MINE is directed at students, scientists and decion-makers. More on http://nature-economy.de/faq/
MINE - Mapping the interplay between Nature and Economy
This Blog Post describes the U.S. federal reserve money system from the perspective of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Therefore it presents a theory of money creation, gives simple examples how this influences the economy and the historical process of why the monetary system of the US has developed this way.
An Introduction in the Federal Reserve Money system
Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
Yes, Money is Endogenous. Who Cares?
According to Karl Marx, work should satisfy people and encourage creativity. But the capitalist production, the separation of labour and the exploitation of workers alienates them from their products.
Karl Marx on Alienation
This paper attempts to clarify how the European economic crisis from 2007 onwards can be understood from the perspective of a Marxian monetary theory of value that emphasizes intrinsic, structural flaws regarding capitalist reproduction. Chapter two provides an empirical description of the European economic crisis, which to some extent already reflects the structural theoretical framework presented in chapter three. Regarding the theoretical framework Michael Heinrich's interpretation of 'the' Marxian monetary theory of value will be presented. Heinrich identifies connections between production and realization, between profit and interest rate as well as between industrial and fictitious capital, which represent contradictory tendencies for which capitalism does not have simple balancing processes. In the context of a discussion of 'structural logical aspects' of Marx's Critique of the Political Economy, explanatory deficits of Heinrich's approach are analyzed. In the following, it is argued that Fred Moseley's view of these 'structural logical aspects' allows empirical 'applications' of Marxian monetary theories of value. It is concluded that a Marxian monetary theory of value, with the characteristics of expansive capital accumulation and its limitations, facilitates a structural analysis of the European economic crisis from 2007 onwards. In this line of argument, expansive production patterns are expressed, among other things, in global restructuring processes, while consumption limitations are mitigated by expansive financial markets and shifts in ex-port destinations.
The European economic crisis from 2007 onwards in the context of a global crisis of over-production of capital - a Marxian monetary theory of value interpretation
Jason Smith takes a stab at blind faith in the efficiency of the price mechanism to provide market information. To do so, he calls upon Information Theory and Generative Adversarial Networks to argue the price mechanism is faulty and skewed towards supply.
Hayek Meets Information Theory. And Fails
First the global mean is calculated from a matrix of three sets each containing three observations. Then the sum of squares is calculated. Lastly, the concept of degree of freedom is explained.
ANOVA 1: Calculating SST (total sum of squares)
The video presents different ways of how to measure the money supply and thereby explains the differences between M0, M1 and M2.
Money supply: M0, M1, and M2 | The monetary system
What is money and how is it used? After answering these questions, Dirk Bezemer analyses how finance can be dysfunctional for the real economy.
When is Finance Bloated and Dysfunctional?
In this article, Hannah Ritchie presents the data we need to understand the scale of their contribution, and which countries are most reliant on Ukraine for their food supplies.
How could the war in Ukraine impact global food supplies?
The workshop deals with the contribution of Plural Economics to the urgently needed change of the economic system towards sustainability and global responsibility.
After completing the module, participants should be able to demarcate and explain different economic approaches to sustainability. They should be able to evaluate the respective concepts based on their contribution to the ecological transformation of the economic system.
Pluralist Economics for a Sustainable Economic Future
How the brain works, how we learn, and why we sometimes make stupid mistakes.
The Science of Thinking
an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other
The Evolution of Trust
The most successful multialternative theories of decision making assume that people consider individual aspects of a choice and proceed via a process of elimination. Amos Tversky was one of the pioneers of this field, but modern decision theorists – most notably Neil Stewart – have moved things forward. At the current stage the theories are able to explain a number of strictly ‘irrational’ but reasonable quirks of human decision making, including various heuristics and biases. Not only this, but eye movements of participants strongly imply that the decision-making process depicted in the theories is an accurate one.
The Quirks of Human Decisions, Explained
An essay of the writing workshop on Nigeria’s Readiness for and the Effect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Role of Women in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Commons stand for a plurality of practices ‘beyond market and state’ as the famous Commons scholar – and first female noble prize winner of economics - Elinor Ostrom put it. Their practice and theory challenge classical economic theory and stand for a different mode of caring, producing and governing. Within this workshop we want to dive into theory, practice and utopia of Commons following four blocks...
The Future of Commons
Aim of this intensive workshop is 1.) to introduce the participants to the macroeconomic workings of the climate crisis as the background of sustainable finance; 2.) to introduce financial assets with ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) criteria attached to them and their markets and important institutional players; 3.) to provide a critical perspective on the current setup of sustainable finance; 4.) and to work on in-depth case studies illustrating the workings on ESG-finance markets, its emitters and traders as well as their macroeconomic implications.
Sustainable Finance – Hoax or necessity. A global perspective
The module is designed to first present some of the main schools of thought from a historical and methodological perspective. Each week we explore and critically assess the main tenants of each school of thought. In the second part of the module we link history of economic thought and methodology to a specific and contemporary economic question. The second part allows you to engage with current economic issues with an awareness of methodology and methodological differences and with some knowledge of the history of economics.
History of Economic Thought
This module examines current socio-political issues through the lens of pluralism, that is pluralism of theory, pluralism of method and interdisciplinary pluralism
Pluralist Economic Analysis
We use cookies on our website. Click on Accept to help us to make Exploring Economics constantly better!