In this teaching pack, we look at the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. In particular, we focus on what it means to take a company private and how the deal was financed.

Although money plays a key role in our lives, the workings of our monetary system are a mystery to most of us. ‘The Waterworks of Money’ by cartographer Carlijn Kingma is an attempt to demystify the world of big finance. It visualizes the flow of money through our society, its hidden power made manifest. If you see money as water, our monetary system is the irrigation system that waters the economy. The better the flow, the more prosperous society will be. Just as water makes crops thrive, so money sets the economy in motion. Or at least that’s the idea. In reality, inequality is growing in many countries and people are dealing with a ‘cost of living crisis’. Meanwhile, the progress with making our economies sustainable is stalling, and financial instability remains an ongoing threat. These problems cannot be seen in isolation from the architecture of our money system. If we truly want to tackle them, we will have to address the design flaws of our current money system. For more info check: https://www.waterworksofmoney.com or https://www.carlijnkingma.com For the Dutch version of the animation check: https://www.ftm.nl/waterwerk Current exhibitions: 'The Future of Money' at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, 14 April, 2023 - 8 September 2023. 'Plumbing The System' at the Dutch Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 20 May 2023 - 26 November 2023 The second animation video of this series will be released in September 2023. The Waterworks of Money is a collaboration of cartographer Carlijn Kingma, investigative financial journalist Thomas Bollen, and professor New Finance Martijn van der Linden. Kingma spent 2300 drawing hours, based on in-depth research and interviews with more than 100 experts –ranging from central bank governors and board members of pension funds and banks to politicians and monetary activists. The structure of our monetary system is not a natural phenomenon. We can choose to change its architecture. Designing the money system– and the laws and institutions that govern it–is ultimately a democratic task, and not a commercial or technocratic one. In practice, however, there is a major obstacle impeding the democratic process: financial illiteracy. By making finance and money needlessly complex, economists, bankers and tax specialists have turned most of us into ‘financial illiterates’. Everyone who doesn’t speak their financial jargon is excluded from the democratic debate on how our monetary system should work. The Waterworks of Money bypasses the financial jargon. It is an attempt to boost systemic financial literacy. Only if ordinary citizens develop their own vocabulary to participate in the debate about their financial future, can they tell their politicians which kind of ‘financial irrigation system’ they want. Authors: Carlijn Kingma, Thomas Bollen, Martijn Jeroen van der Linden Animation: Tiepes, Christian Schinkel, Cathleen van den Akker Narrator: Loveday Smith Translation: Erica Moore Voice recording: Huub Krom Music and sound: Rob Peters Photography: Studio OPPA Partners: Follow the Money, De Haagse Hogeschool, Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, Brave New Works, Rabobank, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Rijksmuseum Twenthe

An introductory course on Game Theory

Some economic events are so major and unsettling that they “change everything.” Such is the case with the financial crisis that started in the summer of 2007 and is still a drag on the world economy. Yet enough time has now elapsed for economists to consider questions that run deeper than the usual focus on the immediate causes and consequences of the crisis.

Economics is extremely sick. It is so locked in its past that nearly all of its introductory textbooks are modelled on one that appeared in 1948. The discipline cannot continue in its autistic state much longer.

Game theory is the standard quantitative tool for analyzing the interactions of multiple decision makers. Its applications extend to economics, biology, engineering and even cyber security.

Free, Fair & Alive is a foundational re-thinking of the commons, the self-organized social systems that human beings have used for millennia to meet their needs.

The world's leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding.

The authors show how consumers, business, the Federal Reserve, and government take into account what's going on around them to make critical decisions like buying new products, building new factories, changing interest rates, or setting budget goals. The book provides a clear roadmap to understanding the whole story behind the global economy.

Money is the fantasy that makes the world go round. Where did it come from and what is its future? From the Bank of England to Bitcoin and the Bristol Pound, LSE sociologist Nigel Dodd explores.

"First published more than a decade ago, Globalizing Capital has remained an indispensable part of economic literature. This classic book emphasizes the importance of the international monetary system for understanding the international economy. The second edition, published in October 2008, has consistently appeared on syllabuses since its release

"The New Classical Macroeconomics "gives an accessible, rigorous, critical account of the central doctrines of the new classical economics, without unnecessarily difficult mathematics. It focuses on four central issues: the foundation of monetary theory; monetary and fiscal policy; labour supply and business cycles; and the attack on econometric models.

The first book to bring together the key writings and speeches of civil rights activist Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander--the first Black American economist In 1921, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander became the first Black American to gain a Ph.D. degree in economics. Unable to find employment as an economist because of discrimination, Alexander became a lawyer so that she could press for equal rights for African Americans.

This episode of the Future Histories Podcast featuring Moira Weigel sets the development of digital capitalism and the right-ward shift in politics and society in relation to one another. It provides a masterful combination of ideology critique and polit-economic analysis grounded in comprehensive knowledge of the digital economy.

The concern of this book is how to model time series statistically and there is emphasized the practical, applied aspects of statistical time series modeling. The author aims to provide methods that may be used to understand and analyze time series that accur in the “real world” that researchers face.

What is economics? What can - and can't - it explain about the world? Why does it matter?

The world is still feeling reverberations from the financial crisis of 2008 foreseen by neither politicians nor economists The history of capitalism has been punctuated by major crises exposing the fragility of our entire economic system How has capitalism despite these ruptures managed to each time resurface more resilient and …

Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought A new evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behaviorHalf of all Americans have money in the stock market yet economists can t agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient as modern financial theory assumes or irrational and inefficient as behavioral …

A previously unpublished collection of Rodney's essays on Marxism, spanning his engagement with of Black Power, Ujamaa Villages, and the everyday people who put an end to a colonial era

The course approaches migration as a constant phenomenon in human history and examines its main supporting theories It illustrates theories about people s individual decisions to migrate and also the factors of migration as a structural feature of our societies It explains the role social networks and institutions play in …

This book discusses the relationship between pluralist economics and the case study method of teaching, advocating the complimentary use of both to advance economics education. Using a multi-paradigmatic philosophical frame of analysis, the book discusses the philosophical, methodological, and practical aspects of the case study method while drawing comparisons with those of the more commonly used lecture method.

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.

This unique up-to-date volume not only provides state-of-the-art discussions of the most recent developments in modern macroeconomics but also includes a series of interviews with leading economists that shed new light on the major intellectual and policy issues of the 1990s. The book is at once an invaluable text and a superb overview that will be welcomed by teachers and students alike.

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.

This blog post reviews "Democratizing Finance", an edited volume that analyses and provides policy proposals to ensure that the financial system serves the public good. Mquzama undertakes the task of summarising the main takeaways from each essay in the book as well as an exposition of its shortfalls. While he acknowledges the necessity of the book's reimaging capitalism and the financial system in a way that is practical within the current economic and political structures, he also highlights its failure to look beyond the United States of America.

Big challenges lie ahead for our society: increased automation of work, and the threat of catastrophic climate change. But so, too, are the huge possibilities presented by new technology and better ways of organising our economy in the wake of neoliberalism's failure.

Is inflation just a number game or does it hold deeper societal implications? Join Isabella Weber (@UMass.Amherst) as she challenges traditional economic stances on inflation and delves into the social dimensions of pricing. Discover how context shapes our reactions to price hikes and why understanding this can be a game-changer.

Economics should schematically explain the key elements and main strands of this core part of social life: the actual workings of our economies. This book argues that orthodox, modern neoclassical economics does not fulfil this core task. Standard economics models do not address the real functioning of our market economies, but rather an imagined economy.

This lecture offers a general and introductory overview of the theory of racial capitalism, focusing on the origins of racial capitalism and some of the debates it has generated.

This guide contains a collection of recommended YouTube channels and YouTube videos in the fields of economics, business and economic policy.

In Colonial Debts Rocío Zambrana develops the concept of neoliberal coloniality in light of Puerto Rico's debt crisis. Drawing on decolonial thought and praxis, Zambrana shows how debt functions as an apparatus of predation that transforms how neoliberalism operates.

This course describes Bayesian statistics in which one s inferences about parameters or hypotheses are updated as evidence accumulates You will learn to use Bayes rule to transform prior probabilities into posterior probabilities and be introduced to the underlying theory and perspective of the Bayesian paradigm The course will apply …