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

601 results

Once in a while the world astonishes itself. Anxious incredulity replaces intellectual torpor and a puzzled public strains its antennae in every possible direction, desperately seeking explanations for the causes and nature of what just hit it. 2008 was such a moment. Not only did the financial system collapse, and send the real economy into a tailspin, but it also revealed the great gulf separating economics from a very real capitalism.
2011
Level: advanced
Modern Political Economics
Financialization is one of the most innovative concepts to emerge in the field of political economy during the last three decades, although there is no agreement on what exactly it is. Profiting Without Producing by Costas Lapavitsas puts forth a distinctive view defining financialization in terms of the fundamental conduct of non-financial enterprises, banks and households.
2014
Level: advanced
Profiting Without Producing
The book explores the imperialist tendency inherent in global capitalism by using a rigorous political economy framework.
2019
Level: advanced
The Wealth of (some) Nations
This brilliantly concise book is a classic introduction to Marx’s key work, Capital. In print now for over a quarter of a century, and previously translated into many languages, the new edition has been fully revised and updated, making it an ideal modern introduction to one of the most important texts in political economy.
2010
Level: advanced
'Marx's Capital'
Understanding the American stock market boom and bust of the 1920s is vital for formulating policies to combat the potentially deleterious effects of busts on the economy.
2014
Level: advanced
The Great Crash of 1929
Since the Middle Ages, literature has portrayed the economic world in poetry, drama, stories and novels. The complexity of human realities highlights crucial aspects of the economy. The nexus linking characters to their economic environment is central in a new genre, the "economic novel", that puts forth economic choices and events to narrate social behavior, individual desires, and even non-economic decisions.
2018
Level: advanced
Economics and Literature
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

Get ready to change the way you think about economics.

Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans--predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth--and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

2016
Level: advanced
Misbehaving
Economics is a broad and diverse discipline, but most economics textbooks only cover one way of thinking about the economy. This book provides an accessible introduction to nine different approaches to economics: from feminist to ecological and Marxist to behavioural.
2017
Level: beginner
Rethinking Economics - An Introduction to Pluralist Economics
What does political economy say about the global sugar production? Take a look at global trade regulations, intercountry inequalities, and the role of marketing.
2015
Level: beginner
Global sugar production - regulations, intercountry inequalities, and marketing
David Graeber introduces different concepts such as money and debt. He takes a historical and anthropological way of explaining the origin. This breaks with the mainstream explanation, which is used in many Economics textbooks, saying that a barter economy was before money arose.
2014
Level: advanced
Debt
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
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.
2024
Level: beginner
Critical Theory for Heterodox Economists: Questioning the Premises of Supply and Demand
The Philosophy of Economics Foundational Text provides a systematic and well-structured overview over the field of philosophy of economics.
2023
Level: beginner
Philosophy of 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?
2025
Level: advanced
The Project of Pluralism
A historical glimpse of how economists of the 19th century debated the usefulness of mathematics to economics
2020
Level: beginner
Mathematical Economics in the 19th Century
As seen with the United Nations significant promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the past few years, the issue of global development is of growing concern to many international organizations. As humanity continues to become more interconnected through globalization, the inequalities and injustices experienced by inhabitants of impacted countries becomes increasingly clear. While this issue can be observed in the papers of different types (e.g., different schools of thought) of economists throughout the world, the work of behavioral and complexity economists offer a unique, collaborative perspective on how to frame decisions for individuals in a way that can positively reverberate throughout society and throughout time.
2018
Level: beginner
Behavioural vs Complexity Economics: Approaches to Development
The objective of the course is to explore the main strengths and weaknesses of orthodox and heterodox paradigms within development economics.
2019
Level: beginner
Issues in Development Economics
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
The article pursues the two related questions of how economists pretend to know and why they want to know at all. It is argued that both the economic form of knowledge and the motivation of knowing have undergone a fundamental change during the course of the 20th century. The knowledge of important contemporary economic textbooks has little in common with an objective, decidedly scientifically motivated knowledge. Rather, their contents and forms follow a productive end, aiming at the subjectivity of their readers.
2019
Level: beginner
An essay on the putative knowledge of textbook economics
With the onset of an economic crisis that has been universally acknowledged since the end of March, two main questions arise: To what extent is the corona pandemic the starting point (or even the cause) of this crisis? And secondly: can the aid programmes that have been adopted prevent a deep and prolonged recession?
2020
Level: beginner
Economic crisis only because of the Corona pandemic?
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.
2025
Level: beginner
The Strange Non-Death of Mainstream Economics
This text provides an easy to understand introduction to complexity economics for non-specialist audiences such as bachelor's students.
2023
Level: beginner
Think Complexity Economics is too Complicated? Then this is for you.
In this essay the authors take a look at how welfare could be provided in a degrowth society.
2019
Level: beginner
Bidding farewell to growth: How to provide welfare in a degrowth society
The article addresses the current debate on democratic economic planning and the question of how and by which instruments a post-capitalist planning system, embedded in a broader agenda of macroeconomic transformation, can be developed.
2025
Level: advanced
On Democratic Economic Planning and Macroeconomic Transformation
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
An essay of the writing workshop on Nigeria’s Readiness for and the Effect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
2020
Level: advanced
The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Economic Impact and Possible Disruptions
The global financial crisis (GFC) led to increasing distrust in economic research and the economics profession, in the process of which the current state of economics and economic education in particular were heavily criticized. Against this background we conducted a study with undergraduate students of economics in order to capture their view of economic education.
2018
Level: beginner
What economics education is missing: The real world
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.
2019
Level: beginner
History of Economic Thought
A review of: [1] Intermediate Microeconomics, H.R. Varian [2] Mikrooekonomie, R.S. Pindyck, D.L. Rubinfeld [3] Grundzuege der mikrooekonomischen Theorie, J. Schumann, U. Meyer, W. Stroebele
2016
Level: beginner
The Dichotomy, Inconsistency, and Peculiar Outmodedness of the "Mainstream" Textbook
Deforestation is estimated to be responsible for about 12-29% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This essay will explore ecological economics as an alternative lens through which to approach forest conservation and the acceleration of climate change.
2018
Level: beginner
Ecological Economics: A Solution to Deforestation?
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
In parallel to rising inflation numbers, the concept of profit inflation has clearly risen to prominence in recent years. But what is it exactly? This dossier aims not only to collect the most important publications on profit inflation but also intends to map out the development of the discourse and the different positions within the debate.
2024
Level: advanced
Profit Inflation: Mapping the debate

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