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332 results
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.
Triggering a Global Financial Crisis: Covid-19 as the Last Straw
Neoclassical economics focuses on the allocation of scarce resources. Economic analysis is mainly concerned with determining the efficient allocation of resources in order to increase welfare.
Neoclassical Economics
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.
A fresh perspective to economic theory: Social preferences and their impact on gender and policy
Pluralism includes mainstream economics. Our campaign for pluralism, including this series, have generally focused on ideas outside the mainstream on the basis that it gets plenty of attention already so we want to spend our time exposing people to alternatives. Nevertheless, mainstream ideas deserve some attention. On top of this, a curious feature of modern economics education is that some of the best ideas from mainstream economics are not even taught to undergraduates! During this series I will explore such ideas, starting today with the market construction technique known as ‘matching’.
It's a match!
An article in the New York Times from early 2025 suggests that the political influence of mainstream economics is declining. While economists have been highly influential in supporting and shaping free-market policies in recent decades, their expertise has become less relevant during intensified economic crises that necessitate state interventions.
The Strange Non-Death of Mainstream Economics
‘We cannot afford their peace & We cannot bear their wars’:
Value, Exploitation, Profitability Crises & ‘Rectification’
Political Economy based on Marx
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.
The Coronavirus and the End of Economics
This report by the 'Institute for Global Prosperity' explores the hypothesis that strengthening and extending universal services is an effective way of tackling poverty and improving wellbeing for all.
Universal Basic Services: Theory and Practice
Maria Kader provides an overview of the ECB's crisis policies in recent years. She outlines the measures taken, their effects, and their shortcomings.
The European Central Bank in a State of Crisis: Policies, Effects and Downsides
In this overview paper, Laura Porak reviews the history of industrial policy in the European Union before the background of a Cultural Political Economy approach.
History of Industrial Policy in the EU
A historical glimpse of how economists of the 19th century debated the usefulness of mathematics to economics
Mathematical Economics in the 19th Century
The general idea of a Job Guarantee (JG) is that the government offers employment to everybody ready, willing and able to work for a living wage in the last instance as an Employer of Last Resort. The concept tackles societal needs that are not satisfied by market forces and the systemic characteristic of unemployment in capitalist societies. Being a central part of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), attention for the JG concept rose in recent years.
The Job Guarantee
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.
Enough! The Sufficiency Approach and the Limits of Economic Growth
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.
Rethinking Democratic Economic Planning: An Overview
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.
Complexity Economics
This article explores the production function, the prevailing view of capital that underpins it, and the main alternative perspective. By exploring these perspectives, the authors aim to provide students with a foundational understanding of the controversies surrounding the treatment of capital in production, a topic expressly excluded from mainstream textbooks.
Why We Should Think Twice About Production Functions
This chapter by the Centre of Economy Studies provides a map through the complex jungle of economic theories. It provides key insights and ideas for thirteen core topics in economics, organised by selecting the most relevant theoretical approaches per topic and contrasting them with each other.
Pragmatic Pluralism
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.
An essay on the putative knowledge of textbook economics
The chapter by the Centre for Economy Studies introduces interdisciplinary economic subdisciplines and their importance for economics education.
Interdisciplinary Economics
Deforestation is estimated to be responsible for about 12-29% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This essay will explore ecological economics as an alternative lens through which to approach forest conservation and the acceleration of climate change.
Ecological Economics: A Solution to Deforestation?
In this essay the author reviews empirical studies in economics that analyze factors behind the rise of nationalist and populist parties in Western countries. He stresses that economic factors (e.g., trade shocks and economic crisis) play a crucial role in the rise of populist parties; however, the discussion of mechanisms driving this trend remains unsatisfying
The Economics of Populism in the Present
An essay of the writing workshop on Nigeria’s Readiness for and the Effect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Economic Impact and Possible Disruptions
This book arose from our conviction that the NNS-DSGE approach to the analysis of aggregate market outcomes is fundamentally flawed. The practice of overcoming the SMD result by recurring to a fictitious RA leads to insurmountable methodological problems and lies at the root of DSGE models’ failure to satisfactorily explain real world features.
Macroeconomics from the Bottom-up
How long the COVID-19 crisis will last, and what its immediate economic costs will be, is anyone's guess. But even if the pandemic's economic impact is contained, it may have already set the stage for a debt meltdown long in the making, starting in many of the Asian emerging and developing economies on the front lines of the outbreak.
The COVID-19 Debt Deluge
Michael Kalecki famously remarked “I have found out what economics is; it is the science of confusing stocks with flows”. Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) models were developed precisely to address this kind of confusion. The basic intuition of SFC models is that the economy is built up as a set of intersecting balance sheets, where transactions between entities are called flows and the value of the assets/liabilities they hold are called stocks. Wages are a flow; bank deposits are a stock, and confusing the two directly is a category error. In this edition of the pluralist showcase I will first describe the logic of SFC models – which is worth exploring in depth – before discussing empirical calibration and applications of the models. Warning that there is a little more maths in this post than usual (i.e. some), but you should be able to skip those parts and still easily get the picture.
Stock Flow Consistent Macroeconomics
Currency hierarchy and policy space: A research agenda for development economics Barbara Fritz
Currency hierarchy and policy space
Economists like to base their theories on individual decision making. Individuals, the idea goes, have their own interests and preferences, and if we don’t include these in our theory we can’t be sure how people will react to changes in their economic circumstances and policy. While there may be social influences, in an important sense the buck stops with individuals. Understanding how individuals process information to come to decisions about their health, wealth and happiness is crucial. You can count me as someone who thinks that on the whole, this is quite a sensible view.
Decision by Sampling, or ‘Psychologists Reclaim Their Turf’
One method of economic modelling that has become increasingly popular in academia, government and the private sector is Agent Based Models, or ABM. These simulate the actions and interactions of thousands or even millions of people to try to understand the economy – for this reason ABM was once described to me as being “like Sim City without the graphics”. One advantage of ABM is that it is flexible, since you can choose how many agents there are (an agent just means some kind of 'economic decision maker' like a firm, consumer, worker or government); how they behave (do they use complicated or simple rules to make decisions?); as well as the environment they act in, then just run the simulation and see what happens as they interact over time.
Agents, agents everywhere
The objective of the course is to explore the main strengths and weaknesses of orthodox and heterodox paradigms within development economics.
Issues in Development Economics
This chapter by the Centre for Economy Studies explores how courses on the history of economic thought and methods could look if they were pluralist and interdisciplinary.
Rethinking the History of Economic Thought & Methods
This syllabus provides an overview of the contents of the course "Understanding Economic Models" at the University of Helsinki.
Understanding Economic Models
Usually, Critical Theory and Economics are, for better or worse, no longer seen to be in a continuum. This article by Lukas Meisner serves as an introduction to Critical Theory for all (heterodox) economists, who want to understand and explain what they can, otherwise, just state and describe.
Critical Theory for Heterodox Economists: Questioning the Premises of Supply and Demand
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