Innovationsökonomie - Prof. Carsten Dreher @FU-Berlin

This lecture briefly discusses historic understandings of the limits to infinite economic growth on a finite planet (from John Stuart Mill to Marx). Taking a ecological economics perspective it discusses the metabolism of the economy, the economy as a subsystem of the environment, biophysical limits to growth, and sustainable economic scales.

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.

Zunächst erläutert Manuel Wäckerle die Grundzüge der der Evolutionsökonomik und präsentiert eine kurze Ideengeschichte der Theorieschule, wobei er insbesondere auf Ansätze von Marx, Schumpeter und Veblen Bezug nimmt. Wäckerle hebt die Rolle von Institutionen in der Evolutionsökonomik hervor, erläutert unterschiedliche Verständnisse von Institutionen und geht dabei auf Gouvernementalität, soziales Lernen, Wissen und Macht ein. Darauf folgt eine wissenschaftstheoretische Annäherung, insbesondere an die Ontologie der Evolutionsökonomik und deren Hauptobjekt der Analyse.

In this lecture Ben Fine aims at stimulating interest for and explaining the relevance of Marxist Political Economy. Ben Fine dedicates the first half of his comprehensible lecture to the question on how mainstream economics became the way it is by explaining its key concepts and how those evolved during the past 150 years. While critically reflecting those concept he also emphasizes that mainstream economics does not consider historical processes. This is the point of departure on his presentation of the core terms and crucial categories of Marxist Political Economy: e.g. the production process and class relations (Part 1). Part 2 examines the consequences of the capitalist mode of production and its propensity to crises. Ben Fine illustrates this Marxist analysis with the example of the current crisis and explains current conditions for the accumulation of capital.