✕
Economics need to change - now more than ever! With Exploring Economics, we strengthen alternative economic approaches and counter mainstream economics with a critical and pluralistic vision of economic education. We also provide background analyses on current economic debates to strengthen a critical economic discourse.
Unfortunately, we are running out of money to continue our work.
With a small contribution you can help Exploring Economics to stay online. Thank you!
We are a registered non-profit organization | Bank account: Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik e.V., IBAN: DE91 4306 0967 6037 9737 00, SWIFT-BIC: GENODEM1GLS | Imprint
647 results
The Sufficiency Policy Map is an online tool for initiatives, political actors, organisations and individuals. It provides recommendations, strategies and communication tools for realizing projects and policy around the topic sufficiency. Sufficiency projects have the aim to reduce one's own ecological footprint.
Sufficiency Politics Map
This multimedia dossier explores the production chain of smartphones. In particular due to the violation of workers' rights and low payments, the author Benjamin Selwyn calls those production structures global poverty chains. In this context, he points to the importance of workers' struggles.
Production Chain of Smartphones
This video explains what a co-operative is, discussing the different types, their history and purposes, before moving on to discuss the current state of the co-operative movement.
What is a Co-op?
Aim: to work out jointly with students a systematic perception of how the gender factor can impact on economic and demographic development. This course is pioneering: it is the first time that such a course has been introduced into the curriculum of a Russian higher educational institution with a focus on economics.
Gender Economics
The podcast is an interview of Silvia Federici by David Denvir. It is centred around her book 'Caliban and the Witch - Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation', but they also draw lines to contemporary issues and political struggles. Federici analyses the emergence of capitalism through a radical Feminist-Marxist lens.
Silvia Federici on Women and Capitalism
The podcast discusses how to deal with the rising inflation and presents a comparative perspective between the US and the EMU. Basically the speakers discuss whether we are heading to a stagflation in Europe similar to the 1970s and they compare the macroeconomic dynamics in the United States vs. the EMU.
Taming inflation? What are the implications of prolonged inflation?
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 …
Why Do People Migrate? Part 2: Theories
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?
Introducing Microeconomic Analysis
The world of economics is changing. Years of turmoil in the global economy mean that nothing will ever be quite the same again. This is the starting point and theme of this radically revised Economist books classic.
The Economist: Economics 4th edition
This book analyzes the transition of chocolate from an exotic curiosity to an Atlantic commodity. It shows how local, inter-regional, and Atlantic markets interacted with one another and with imperial political economies. It explains how these interactions, intertwined with the resilience of local artisanal production, promoted the partial democratization of chocolate consumption as well as economic growth.
Empire, Political Economy, and the Diffusion of Chocolate in the Atlantic World
In this sharp intervention, authors Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago defiantly develop a feminist understanding of debt, showing its impact on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and examining the relationship between debt and social reproduction.
A Feminist Reading of Debt
This open access book presents an alternative to capitalism and state socialism through the modelling of a post-market and post-state utopia based on an upscaling of the commons, feminist political economy and democratic and council-based planning approaches.
Make Capitalism History
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent history, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from here in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty, in what is sure to be a much-debated book in its own right.
After Piketty
This syllabus provides an overview of the content of the Philosophy and Economics course at the University of Waterloo.
Philosophy and Economics
A review of:
[1] Intermediate Microeconomics, H.R. Varian
[2] Mikrooekonomie, R.S. Pindyck, D.L. Rubinfeld
[3] Grundzuege der mikrooekonomischen Theorie, J. Schumann, U. Meyer, W. Stroebele
The Dichotomy, Inconsistency, and Peculiar Outmodedness of the "Mainstream" Textbook
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.
Cooperative Economics
The most successful multialternative theories of decision making assume that people consider individual aspects of a choice and proceed via a process of elimination. Amos Tversky was one of the pioneers of this field, but modern decision theorists – most notably Neil Stewart – have moved things forward. At the current stage the theories are able to explain a number of strictly ‘irrational’ but reasonable quirks of human decision making, including various heuristics and biases. Not only this, but eye movements of participants strongly imply that the decision-making process depicted in the theories is an accurate one.
The Quirks of Human Decisions, Explained
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.
Decolonizing Economics
This Perspective argues that ergodicity — a foundational concept in equilibrium statistical physics — is wrongly assumed in much of the quantitative economics literature. By evaluating the extent to which dynamical problems can be replaced by probabilistic ones, many economics puzzles become resolvable in a natural and empirically testable fashion.
The ergodicity problem in economics
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 …
Adaptive Markets
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.
How not to save the economy? The interplay of economics and health during the COVID-19 pandemic
How countries achieve long-term GDP growth is up there with the most important topics in economics. As Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas put it “the consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.” Ricardo Hausmann et al take a refreshing approach to this question in their Atlas of Economic Complexity. They argue a country’s growth depends on the complexity of its economy: it must have a diverse economy which produces a wide variety of products, including ones that cannot be produced much elsewhere. The Atlas goes into detail on exactly what complexity means, how it fits the data, and what this implies for development. Below I will offer a summary of their arguments, including some cool data visualisations.
GDP Growth: It’s Complicated
In its first edition, this book helped to define the emerging field of ecological economics. This new edition surveys the field today. It incorporates all of the latest research findings and grounds economic inquiry in a more robust understanding of human needs and behavior.
Ecological Economics - Principles and Applications
This course introduces students to political economy and the history of economic thought. We will cover the core ideas in various schools of economic thought, positioning them in the historical and institutional context in which they were developed. In particular, we will cover some economic ideas from the ancient world and the middle ages; the enlightenment; the emergence of and main ideas in classical political economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and others); Marx, Mill, and Keynes; European versus American economic thought through history; the rise of mathematical economics; economic theories around state-managed economies versus socialism; Austrian economics; behavioral economics; and the future of economics.
Political Economy and the History of Economic Thought
Ecologcial economics conceptualizes our society as embedded within the environment and our economic system as embedded within society and the environment.
Is ecological economics for rebels? Accounting for natural resources
In a span of around 12 weeks, the course covers a wide range of topics including agent-based modeling, networks, dynamic, chaos, information, fractals, cooperation models and scaling in biology and society. The course acts as a perfect beginner level introduction spanning a wide range of topics in the field of complexity.
Introduction to Complexity
This syllabus provides an overview of the contents of the course "The Philosophy and Methodology of Economics" at the Duke University
The Philosophy and Methodology of Economics
If there’s one method economists have neglected the most, it’s qualitative research. Whereas economists favour mathematical models and statistics, qualitative research seeks to understand the world through intensive investigation of particular circumstances, which usually entails interviewing people directly about their experiences. While this may sound simple to quantitative types the style, purpose, context, and interpretation of an interview can vary widely. Because of this variety, I have written a longer post than usual on this topic rather than doing it a disservice. Having said that, examples of qualitative research in economics are sadly scant enough that it doesn’t warrant multiple posts. In this post I will introduce qualitative research in general with nods to several applications including the study of firm behaviour, race, Austrian economics, and health economics. More than usual I will utilise block quotes, which I feel is in the spirit of the topic.
Qualitative Methods in Economics: "You Can Observe a Lot Just by Watching"
This chapter discusses the role of gender in economic relations, processes, and outcomes. Gender differences in economic outcomes such as labor force participation and wages have received growing attention from economists in the last several decades – a positive and much needed development in economic thinking.
Illuminating the role of gender in the economy
This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of work-related gender issues and to enable students to analyze the issues using the tools of economics.
Women, Men, & Work
The 2007–08 credit crisis and the long recession that followed brutally exposed the economic and social costs of financialization. Understanding what lay behind these events, the rise of “fictitious capital” and its opaque logic, is crucial to grasping the social and political conditions under which we live. Yet, for most people, the operations of the financial system remain shrouded in mystery.
Fictitious Capital
Dani Rodrik reflects in this book on important questions about how economics works and what might be wrong with it. He points out flaws and weakness of the discipline, but also argues that certain criticisms which have brought forward against are without merit. His central point is that there is not just one economic model, but a variety of them and it is important to apply judgment when selecting the most suitable one for a particular situation.
Economics Rules
We use cookies on our website. Click on Accept to help us to make Exploring Economics constantly better!