(Some) Visions for the economy - Economy Studies

(Some) Visions for the economy - Economy Studies
Economy Studies , 2022
Level: beginner
Perspectives: Ecological Economics, Institutionalist Economics, Neoclassical Economics, Other
Topic: (De-)growth, Institutions, Governments & Policy, Macroeconomics, Reflection of Economics
Format: Teaching Package
The Centre for Economy Studies works on improving and modernising economics education to ensure that students will be better prepared for their future careers and the societal challenges we face today and in the coming decades. The Essential Lectures are teaching packs designed for 90-minute (online or offline) sessions that can be added to existing courses. They help students become familiar with an important topic that is often neglected. Feel free to adjust the material to make it fit with your context and purpose.

Essential Lectures   Economy Studies

Visions for the Economy

The goal of this teaching pack is to make students familiar with different visions for how the economy could be organised and enable them to critically reflect on such ideas. As future economic experts, it is important that they become aware of prominent proposals for reorganising the economy and practise how to deal with them. Lacking this knowledge would hamper them in their future work, as they will be required to provide advice and take actions while being uninformed about it. 

Visions for the economy can range from short-term concrete policy proposals to idealistic frameworks of utopian economic systems. These ideas about how to structure and organise an economy are crucial for any economist to be familiar with. The aim is not to turn economics students into believers of those visions. Instead, the goal is to make students knowledgeable about the variety of visions, so they can develop a good understanding of them and are able to inform non-economists about them. This is important because these economic visions are likely to shape the future: they are already influencing political movements and policy decisions.

The lecture explores different visions by looking in more detail at the examples of radical markets, economic bicameralism and degrowth. During the lecture students practise reflecting on their implications for freedom and fairness. In the final part of the class, students dive into another policy idea and reflect upon its logic, mechanics, and potential impact.

If you are an educator and you are interested in receiving possible exam questions and assessment exercises, send  an email to economy.studies@ourneweconomy.nl and they will send them to you.

Download Instructors Guide Download Slides Download Exercise Sheet

This material has been suggested and edited by:

Hannah Kiefer
Tags: alternative economic systems | degrowth | economic democracy | Economy Studies | monopoly | power asymmetry | teaching package
Die Schuldenbremse destabilisiert das System. Sie bremst Investitionen in die öffentliche Daseinsvorsorge und bereitet damit den Boden für rechtsextreme Positionen. Die Kolumne „Gastwirtschaft“ in der Franksfurter Rundschau von Tung Doan.
2024
Level: beginner
Schuldenbremse einhalten? Die Demokratie ist gefährdet
Tung Doan
Frankfurter Rundschau
Fragen über den Zweck, die Struktur und den Inhalt des wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Curriculums sie sind so alt wie die Disziplin selbst. Ein prominentes deutsches Beispiel ist der vor mehr als 100 Jahren ausgefochtene Werturteilsfreiheitsstreit. Das öffentliche kritische Interesse an den Wirtschaftswissenschaften korreliert mit den Krisen des Systems. Aus dieser Warte gesehen ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass sich nach der großen Finanzkrise in den Nuller Jahren dieses Jahrhunderts vermehrt kritische Stimmen zu Wort melden.
Level: beginner
Eine kritische Lehrbuchanalyse
 
Universität Siegen
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.
2018
Level: beginner
Homo Economicus: Why are new year’s resolutions so difficult to maintain and economic models so bad at predicting our behaviour?
Antonia T. Schröder
Pluralist Economics Fellowship
In this lecture, Beatrice Cherrier explains why it is worth to research the history of JEL codes. The changing relationship between theory and application and the rise and death of new economic topics in the XXth century through the successive revisions of the classification system economists use to publish, recruit and navigate their discipline.
2017
Level: beginner
Understanding the transformation of Economics through the history of JEL codes
Beatrice Cherrier
Lecture series at the Ruhr-University Bochum
Hamilton argues that economics lacks the political economy context in order to understand racism, and demonstrates how racism is embedded in the political economy of America.
2020
Level: beginner
How America’s Economy Runs on Racism
Lynn Parramore
Institute for New Economic Thinking
The article is a formal response to the debate between the economists Diane Coyle and Howard Reed, whose articles were published online by Prospect magazine in 2018. Then, it was taken by Rethinking Economics as representative for the vision of the global network which advocates for changing economics curricula. In fact, it clearly solves some issues within the debate around pluralism by explaining its common misunderstandings among academics and its true - often mislead - meaning.
2018
Level: advanced
Deliberate Misunderstandings in Economics: What Pluralism Really Means
Leonardo Conte
Rethinking Economics
Peter Boettke, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, talks about the history and the main methodological and epistemological tenets of the Austrian school. He argues that good economics is the mainline tradition of "squaring rational choice with the invisible hand theorem through institutional analysis".
2015
Level: beginner
The Austrian Tradition in Economics
Pete Boettke
YouTube

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