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This Forum in the Boston Review deals with the role of economics in modern policymaking and presents a wide set of perspectives on the topic. The opening text by Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik and Gabriel Zucman aims to answer a range of common criticisms against the modern, neoclassical science of economics and its influence on public discussions.
"Energy issues have always been important in international relations, but in recent years may have become even more important than in the past due to the widespread awareness of existing limits to energy sources and negative climate impacts. The course discusses global trends in energy consumption and production, various available scenarios for potential developments in the coming decades, the availability of oil reserves and the evolution of the oil industry. It then discusses natural gas and highlights the differences between oil and gas. It will also discuss renewable energy sources, nuclear energy and EU energy policy.
The course aims at providing students whose main interest is in international relations a background on energy resources, technology and economic realities to allow them to correctly interpret the political impact of current developments. It also aims at providing students, who already have a technical background in energy science or engineering, with the broad global view of energy issues that will allow them to better understand the social, economic and political impact of their technical knowledge."
Part I: Basic Economic Problems Is Economics a Science? Is It Useful? (Lawrence Boland, Ian Parker) Is There Such a Thing as a Free Market? (William Watson, Robert Prasch) Part II: Consumers and Firms Is Homo Economicus an Appropriate Representation of Real-World Consumers? (Joseph Persky, Morris Altman) Is the Consumer Sovereign?
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.
This book is about the application to economics of evolutionary ideas from biology.
Author of a dozen books in economics and history, she was formerly known as Donald. Her experience in changing gender is reflected in the new edition, but the message remains the same: economics needs to get serious about its rhetoric, and back to science.
The book is a collection of 51 texts by different scholars and activists, who each adds a dimension/perspective to the topics of degrowth and societal transformation. A societal transformation towards a degrowth society is dependent on a lot of ideas coming together and creating change from various starting points within a society. Therefore, the authors are quite diverse and their contributions vary from being philosophical, natural science based, economic, sociological and so forth. Some are specfiically focused on a concept and others are a more broad critique of e.g., capitalism or growth.
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.
Lean Logic is the late David Fleming’s masterpiece, the product of more than thirty years’ work and a testament to the creative brilliance of one of Britain’s most important intellectuals. A dictionary unlike any other, it leads readers through Fleming’s stimulating exploration of fields as diverse as culture, history, science, art, logic, ethics, myth, economics, and anthropology, being made up of four hundred and four engaging essay-entries covering topics such as Boredom, Community, Debt, Growth, Harmless Lunatics, Land, Lean Thinking, Nanotechnology, Play, Religion, Spirit, Trust, and Utopia. The threads running through every entry are Fleming’s deft and original analysis of how our present market-based economy is destroying the very foundations—ecological, economic, and cultural— on which it depends, and his core focus: a compelling, grounded vision for a cohesive society that might weather the consequences
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.
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.
The premise of this workshop is that we, as knowledge producers - especially within westernized universities (Grosfoguel, 2013), are significantly implicated in neoliberal imaginaries that are often in service of hierarchical, binary, competitive and linear narratives of growth as civilizational progress.
From the two premises that (1) economies are complex systems and (2) the accumulation of knowledge about reality is desirable, I derive the conclusion that pluralism with regard to economic research programs is a more viable position to hold than monism. To substantiate this claim an epistemological framework of how scholars study their objects of inquiry and relate their models to reality is discussed. Furthermore, it is argued that given the current institutions of our scientific system, economics self-organizes towards a state of scientific unity. Since such a state is epistemologically inferior to a state of plurality, critical intervention is desirable.
This course provides future change makers in public and private sectors with a comprehensive overview on the structures and actors that shape markets.
Exploring Economics, an open-access e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
The Philosophy of Economics Foundational Text provides a systematic and well-structured overview over the field of philosophy of economics.
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 …
This course will fundamentally ask whether we can, or even should use the word ‘decolonising’ in our pursuit of a better economics?
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.
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.
This paper starts with an evaluation of three common arguments against pluralism in economics: (1) the claim that economics is already pluralist, (2) the argument that if there was the need for greater plurality, it would emerge on its own, and (3) the assertion that pluralism means ‘anything goes’ and is thus unscientific. Pluralist responses to all three arguments are summarized. The third argument is identified to relate to a greater challenge for pluralism: an epistemological trade-off between diversity and consensus that suggests moving from a discussion about ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ towards a discussion about the adequate degree of plurality. We instantiate the trade-off by showing how it originates from two main challenges: the need to derive adequate quality criteria for a pluralist economics, and the necessity to propose strategies that ensure the communication across different research programs. The paper concludes with some strategies to meet these challenges.
Behavioural economics deals with observing behaviour and economic decision making behaviour.
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
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.
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.
This article explores if power dynamics in the household can be changed, and if so, how. In this context the focus is laid on government childcare policy and its various channels of possible influence.
With a focus on Chile, Pinochet’s Economic Accomplices: An Unequal Country byForce uses theoretical arguments and empirical studies to argue that focusing onthe behavior of economic actors of the dictatorship is crucial to achieve basic objectivesin terms of justice, memory, reparation, and non-repetition measures.
In this lecture, Sanjay Reddy reviews the work of János Kornai, especially his critique of the socialist system, which is rooted in his understanding of the eminently political character of socialism.
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.
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.
This syllabus provides an overview of the content of the Philosophy and Economics course at the University of Waterloo.
After completing the module, participants should be able to analyse the concepts of degrowth, ecological unequal exchange, Green New Deal, and embeddedness by applying theories situated within the fields of academic research of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology.
A historical glimpse of how economists of the 19th century debated the usefulness of mathematics to economics