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235 results
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.
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.
The plumbing of the financial system is coming under strain like never before. On this week’s podcast, we speak with two legendary experts on how the money system works: Zoltan Pozsar of Credit Suisse and Perry Mehrling of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. They explain the extreme level of stress we’re seeing, what the Fed has done to alleviate, what more needs to be done, and what the post-crisis future may look like.
Central banking is anything but clear-cut. As this webinar with Benjamin Braun demonstrates, the standard view of central banks as independent public entities that govern financial markets and "print" money is at least partially misleading.
Modern mission theory is guided largely by the three self paradigm that suggests indigenous churches can only be healthy if they are self-governing, self-propagating, and self-supporting. Consequently, Western missionaries, their churches, and their agencies have been increasingly indisposed to giving generously. We must rethink the interplay of dollars dependency and what it means to do the right thing with our money as we pursue twenty-first century missions.
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.
Prof. Robert Guttmann looks at the current transformation of the international world order through the lenses of global money and finance.
This fresh and unique textbook provides students and general readers with an introduction to economics from a new and much needed perspective, characterised by its uniquely pluralist, sustainable, progressive and global approach.
Unlike traditional textbooks, Introducing a New Economics contains the key concepts of pluralism, sustainability and justice. It provides students with the central questions covered by economics including resources, work, employment, poverty, inequality, power, capital, markets, money, debt and value.
Post-Keynesians focus on the analysis of capitalist economies, perceived as highly productive, but unstable and conflictive systems. Economic activity is determined by effective demand, which is typically insufficient to generate full employment and full utilisation of capacity.
In the history of the social sciences, few individuals have exerted as much influence as has Jeremy Bentham. His attempt to become “the Newton of morals” has left a marked impression upon the methodology and form of analysis that social sciences like economics and political science have chosen as modus operandi.
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.
Florian Kern replies to Zoltan Pozsar's analysis about the effects of the war in Ukraine on the global financial order and refutes the latter's prognosis of the demise of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency
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.
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.
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.
What made the false assumption that saving the economy at all cost during a pandemic so popular? This paper discusses different pathways through the COVID-19 pandemic at national and international level, and their consequences on the health of citizens and their economies.
As opposed to the conventional over-simplified assumption of self-interested individuals, strong evidence points towards the presence of heterogeneous other-regarding preferences in agents. Incorporating social preferences – specifically, trust and reciprocity - and recognizing the non-constancy of these preferences across individuals can help models better represent the reality.
The Philosophy of Economics Foundational Text provides a systematic and well-structured overview over the field of philosophy of economics.
After completing the module, participants should have gained a basic understanding of the economic school of thought referred to as "Modern Monetary Theory" and should be able to analyze the monetary processes at play in the economy and evaluate fiscal and monetary policy decisions from an MMT-perspective.
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.
This article outlines the fundamental challenges of democratically planned economies and categorises proposed models into six groups, each of which approaches planning and coordination at different levels of authority and between myriad economic units in a particular way, taking into account efficiency as well as democratic principles and environmental and social sustainability. Through a classification system based on decision-making authority and mediation mechanisms, the article provides a framework for understanding and comparing these models. By examining their different approaches, it offers insights into the complexities and potential paths of democratically planned economies in the 21st century.
By conducting a discourse analysis (SKAD) in the field of academic economics textbooks, this paper aims at reconstructing frames and identity options offered to undergraduate students relating to the questions ‘Why study economics?’ and ‘Who do I become by studying economics?’. The analysis showed three major frames and respective identity offerings, all of which are contextualized theoretically, with prominent reference to the Foucauldian reflection of the science of Political Economy. Surprisingly, none of them encourages the student to think critically, as could have been expected in a pedagogical context. Taken together, economics textbooks appear as a “total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible action” (Foucault), therefore, as a genuine example of Foucauldian power structures.
‘We cannot afford their peace & We cannot bear their wars’:
Value, Exploitation, Profitability Crises & ‘Rectification’
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.
This is an overview of (possibly transformative) proposals to address the economic consequences of the corona crisis
A historical glimpse of how economists of the 19th century debated the usefulness of mathematics to economics
Whether a black swan or a scapegoat, Covid-19 is an extraordinary event. Declared by the WHO as a pandemic, Covid-19 has given birth to the concept of the economic “sudden stop.” We need extraordinary measures to contain it.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has substantially accelerated the digitalization of the economy. Yet, this unprecedented growth of digital technology brought novel challenges to the labour market. Rise in income inequalities and precarious working conditions or polarization of jobs. In this essay, we try to assess what tools to use to counter these trends.
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.
Dependency in Central and Eastern Europe - Self-reliance and the need to move beyond economic growth
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.
An essay of the writing workshop on contemporary issues in the field of Nigerian economics: The adverse effect of climate change is overwhelming, not just in Nigeria but globally. Global warming is the result of hostile human activities that have impacted the environment negatively. This is the principal variable the government should tackle through practical innovations such as the acceptable implementation of Adaptation Policies and also through the adequate implementation of environmental tax. These will enhance pro-environmental behaviour which is fit for socio-political and economic activities for sustainability.
The last 15 years have seen extensive research into ecosystem service valuation (ESV), spurred by the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005 (Baveye, Baveye & Gowdy, 2016). Ecosystem services are defined as “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems” (Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, p.V). For example, ecosystems provide the service of sequestering carbon which helps regulate the climate. Valuation means giving ecosystems or their services a monetary price, for example researchers have estimated that the carbon sequestration services of the Mediterranean Sea is between 100 and 1500 million euros per year. The idea of ESV was a response to the overuse of natural resources and degradation of ecosystems, allegedly due to their undervaluation and exclusion from the monetary economy. ESV can be used (1) for policy decision-making, for example allocating funding to a reforestation project (2) for setting payments to people who increase ecosystem services, for example a farmer increasing the organic carbon content of their soil, and (3) for determining fees for people who degrade ecosystem services, for example a company that causes deforestation.
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