RETHINK
ECONOMICS
RETHINK
ECONOMICS
... and receive personalised notifications on
new pluralistic content directly into your inbox!

1000 results

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a school of monetary and macroeconomic thought that focuses on the analysis of the monetary and credit system, and in particular on the question of credit creation by the state.
2020
Level: beginner
Modern Monetary Theory
The Economics and Geopolitics of Russia Selling Yuan and Gold Reserves It is important for students to understand the workings of international and public finance and that the goal of governments and politicians is not always economic efficiency when making financial decisions. Normative goals other than efficiency can motivate economic decisions. A good economist is able to recognise, clearly name and take into account the values and goals behind economic behaviour, when making sense of the world.
2023
Level: beginner
Russia sells foreign reserves
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?
The third edition of Political Economy: The Contest of Economic Ideas is a fully updated overview of the political economy and its connection with social concerns. This book investigates the main traditions of economic ideas and provides a 'big picture' overview of the analytical tools and value judgements associated with competing schools of economic thought.
2011
Level: advanced
Political Economy
The 2022 FIFA World Cup (including the construction work required for it) provides a clear example of economic activity that has taken place despite the financial costs to the Qatari state being an order of magnitude larger than the financial benefits it will receive. Whilst this is a fairly extreme case in terms of how many different costs and benefits are involved and how unequally they have been spread, many economic decisions are more complicated than mere financial calculations and it is therefore vital for students to be able to think about multiple dimensions involved in economic decisions.
2023
Level: beginner
The Economics of a World Cup in Qatar
This historic timeline presents economic events, economic thinkers and schools of thought from the 18th century until the 2007/2008 financial and economic crisis with short texts on the respective event or perspective.
2017
Level: beginner
Economics: An Illustrated Timeline
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.
2019
Level: advanced
The Econ in Econophysics
This course provides future change makers in public and private sectors with a comprehensive overview on the structures and actors that shape markets.
2019
Level: beginner
The Governance of Markets in Challenging Times: From Classic Authors to New Approaches
Behavioural economics deals with observing behaviour and economic decision making behaviour.
Behavioral Economics
Exploring Economics Dossier on the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and the structural crisis of globalization. COVID-19 encounters a structural crisis of globalization and the economic system that drives it, with an uncertain outcome. We asked economists worldwide to share with us their analysis of current events, long-term perspectives and political responses. The dossier will be continuously expanded.
2020
Level: beginner
The Next Great Recession? Exploring Economics Dossier
A central question in development economics literature is, “Why do countries stay poor?” The key disagreements are whether the lack of economic growth stems from institutions or from geography (Nunn 2009). From an institutional perspective, hostile tariff regimes and commodity price dependencies form a barrier to a sectoral shift that would otherwise lead to economic development in developing countries (Blink and Dorton 2011) (Stiglitz 2006).[i]
2020
Level: beginner
Trade Barriers to Development explored through various lenses
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
Stratification economics is defined as a systemic and empirically grounded approach to addressing intergroup inequality. Stratification economics integrates economics, sociology and social psychology to distinctively analyze inequality across groups that are socially differentiated, be it by race, ethnicity, gender, caste, sexuality, religion or any other social differentiation.
2021
Level: beginner
Stratification Economics
Here we look at the effect of the 2008 Climate Change Act passed in Parliament in the United Kingdom as an effort to curb emissions in all sectors. The Act aside from setting goals to become a low-carbon economy sets up an independent committee on Climate Change to ensure the implementation of policies to comply with the ultimate goal of 80% reduction in total emissions in 2050. I make use of the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) to create a comparative case study in which the creation of a synthetic UK serves as a counterfactual where the treatment never occurred (Cunningham, 2018).
2020
Level: beginner
Synthetic Control Method for Estimating the Effect of the Climate Change Act of 2008 in Britain
It is perhaps fitting that the seriousness of the coronavirus threat hit most of the Western world around the Ides of March, the traditional day of reckoning of outstanding debts in Ancient Rome. After all, problems and imbalances have accumulated in the Western capitalist system over four decades, ostensibly since it took the neoliberal road out of the 1970s crisis and kept going along it, heedless of the crises and problems it led to.
2020
Level: beginner
The Unexpected Reckoning: Coronavirus and Capitalism
The core idea of ecological economics is that human economic activity is bound by absolute limits. Interactions between the economy, society and the environment are analysed, while always keeping in mind the goal of a transition towards sustainability.
Ecological Economics
Austrian economics focuses on the economic coordination of individuals in a market economy. Austrian economics emphasises individualism, subjectivism, laissez-faire politics, uncertainty and the role of the entrepreneur, amongst others.
Austrian Economics
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
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
As the current economic crisis spreads around the globe questions are being asked about what king of capitalist or post-capitalist economy will follow. There is increasing talk of the need for stringent economic regulation, the need to temper greed and individualism, to make the economy work for human and social development.
2009
Level: advanced
The Social Economy
This course teaches basic concepts relevant in political economy. Topics include the contractual nature of the state, public versus private goods, property rights and economic externalities, the logic of collective action and social choice theory. It also refers to the fundamentals of political philosophy, bringing two ideas of liberty into the picture. The relevance and limitations of the economic approach to the study of law and politics are then discussed.
Level: advanced
State, Law and the Economy
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
One method of economic modelling that has become increasingly popular in academia, government and the private sector is Agent Based Models, or ABM. These simulate the actions and interactions of thousands or even millions of people to try to understand the economy – for this reason ABM was once described to me as being “like Sim City without the graphics”. One advantage of ABM is that it is flexible, since you can choose how many agents there are (an agent just means some kind of 'economic decision maker' like a firm, consumer, worker or government); how they behave (do they use complicated or simple rules to make decisions?); as well as the environment they act in, then just run the simulation and see what happens as they interact over time.
2020
Level: beginner
Agents, agents everywhere
Exploring Economics, an open-access e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
2021
Level: beginner
The Political Economy of Inequalities
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.
2025
Level: beginner
The Political Economy of Extractivism
Economic theory is currently at a crossroads, where many leading mainstream economists are calling for a more realistic and practical orientation for economic science. Indeed, many are suggesting that economics should be reconstructed on evolutionary lines.
This book is about the application to economics of evolutionary ideas from biology.
1996
Level: advanced
Economics and Evolution
Economics for Emancipation (E4E) is a seven-module introductory curriculum with interactive and participatory workshops. It offers a deep critical dive into the current political economic system, exploration of alternative economic systems, and dynamic tools to dream and build the economy that centers care, relationship, and liberation.
2023
Level: beginner
Economics for Emancipation
How long the COVID-19 crisis will last, and what its immediate economic costs will be, is anyone's guess. But even if the pandemic's economic impact is contained, it may have already set the stage for a debt meltdown long in the making, starting in many of the Asian emerging and developing economies on the front lines of the outbreak.
2020
Level: beginner
The COVID-19 Debt Deluge
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.
2025
Level: beginner
Price Controls Against Inflation
Debunking Economics - Revised and Expanded Edition exposes what many non-economists may have suspected and a minority of economists have long known: that economic theory is not only unpalatable, but also plain wrong. When the original Debunking Economics was published back in 2001, the market economy seemed invincible, and conventional "neoclassical" economic theory basked in the limelight.
2011
Level: beginner
Debunking Economics - Revised and Expanded Edition
Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. In From Here to Equality, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery.
2020
Level: advanced
From Here to Equality
Covering Institutionalist, Post-Keynesian, Marxist, and Feminist perspectives, Heterodox Economics of Military Spending provides a comprehensive analysis of the effect of military expenditures on the economy.The impact of military spending on economic growth has always been a crucial issue for policymakers and academics. There exists an extensive body of literature on how military spending affects macroeconomic variables, including but not limited to economic growth, profit rates, income inequality, gender inequality, and employment.
2025
Level: advanced
Heterodox Economics of Military Spending

Donate

This project is brought to you by the Network for Pluralist Economics (Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik e.V.).  It is committed to diversity and independence and is dependent on donations from people like you. Regular or one-off donations would be greatly appreciated.

 

Donate