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Firms are the primary places where economic activity takes place in modern capitalist economies: they are where most stuff is produced; where many of us spend 40 hours a week; and where big decisions are made about how to allocate resources. Establishing how they work is hugely important because it helps us to understand patterns of production and consumption, including how firms will react to changes in economic conditions and policy. And a well-established literature – led by post-Keynesians and institutionalists – holds that the best way to determine how firms work is to…wait for it...ask firms how they work. This a clearly sensible proposition that is contested in economics for some reason, but we’ll ignore the controversy here and just explore the theory that springs from this approach.
The ‘How Firms Work’ Approach to How Firms Work
John K. Galbraith tells the economic history of a couple of economies (mostly UK, US and to a lesser extent Germany) from the end of the first world war until the Bretton Woods conference. He also provides a biography of John M. Keynes and outlines some central ideas of Keynes such as the possibility of an underemployment equilibrium. Galbraith complements the historical remarks by the biographical experiences he made in economic management (and in engaging with Keynes) serving as deputy head of the Office for Price administration during the second world war.
The Age of Uncertainty Episode 7 The Mandarin Revolution
Mark Blyth criticises the political inability to solve the persistent economic crisis in Europe against the background of a deflationary environment. Ideological blockades and impotent institutions are the mutually reinforcing causes of European stagnation. The deeper roots lie in the structural change of the economic system since the 1980s, when neoliberalism emerged as hegemonic ideology. This ideology prepared the ground for austerity and resulting deflationary pressures and a strategy of all seeking to export their way out of trouble. Worryingly this is breeding populist and nationalist resentments in Europe.
Policies to avert stagnation: The Crisis and the Future(s) of the Euro
Irene van Staveren, professor of pluralist development economics, presents her pluralist teaching method for the introductory level. Based on her textbook “Economics After the Crisis: An Introduction to Economics from a Pluralist and Global Perspective” she suggests to focus on real-world problems and pari passu apply economic theories such as Social economics, Institutional economics, Post-Keynesian economics as well as Neoclassical economics without wasting time to single out the latter. Besides pointing out advantages of such a pluralist method Irene illustrates her approach based on interesting topics such as growth or feminist economics.
Beyond stimulus versus Austerity: Pluralist capacity building in Macroeconomics
In the inspiring interview on Economics of Care, Nancy Foblre takes a closer look to the consequences of the marketization of caring activities on those activities and on the societal organization of care. Folbre elaborates on how to value care and how this shifts the perspectives on living standards. She points to the fact, that caring activities are undervalued both in the market sphere and within the family and thereby questions the division between those spheres. Lastly, Folbre answers the question how to reteach Economics when accounting for caring activities.
The Economics of Care
Environmental catastrophe looms large over politics: from the young person’s climate march to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, increasing amounts of political space are devoted to the issue. Central to this debate is the question of whether economic growth inevitably leads to environmental issues such as depleted finite resources and increased waste, disruption of natural cycles and ecosystems, and of course climate change. Growth is the focal point of the de-growth and zero-growth movements who charge that despite efficiency gains, increased GDP always results in increased use of energy and emissions. On the other side of the debate, advocates of continued growth (largely mainstream economists) believe that technological progress and policies can ‘decouple’ growth from emissions.
To Grow or Not to Grow?
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
This video animates part of the talk “On Economics” by Ha-Joon Chang in which he states that economics is not a science for experts but for everyone. Chang further argues why it is important to take into account different perspectives on economics – he identifies at least nine school of thoughts which all have their strengths and weaknesses and presents examples on free trade and well-being. Chang further elaborates on the difficulties of changing the economic status quo.
Economics Is For Everyone!
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.
Promises, Promises: A history of debt
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
Gilles Carbonnier, Professor of Development Economics and Director of Studies at The Graduate Institute Geneva, explains the emerging field of Humanitarian Economics. It analyses how economics can help to better grasp and respond to humanitarian crises, and why capturing market dynamics - including the humanitarian market itself, or in relation to e.g. kidnapping and detention in war - has become critical.
The Birth of Humanitarian Economics
Economic sociology is an entire subfield and one could write an series on it, so I’m going to stick to probably the most prominent economic sociologist and the founder of ‘new economic sociology’, Mark Granovetter.
Economic Sociology: the Contributions of Mark Granovetter
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
In both economics textbooks and public perceptions central banks are a fact of life. On the wall of my A-level economics classroom there was the Will Rogers quote “there have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking”, summarising how many economists view the institution. There is a widespread belief that there is something different about money which calls for a central authority to manage its operation, a view shared even by staunch free marketeers such as Milton Friedman. This belief is not without justification, since money underpins every transaction in a way that apples do not, but we should always be careful not to take existing institutions for granted and central banking is no exception. In this post I will look at the idea of private or free banking, where banks compete (and cooperate) to issue their own currency.
Whither Central Banks?
A multimedia dossier outlining the various dimensions of credit and indebtedness for various actors such as individuals and governments. Special emphasis is put on the reflections of normative and power laden discourse sorrounding the issue of borrowing and on false analogies placed between household and government debt.
Borrowing – I-PEEL.org
At the 2013 Climate, Mind, & Behavior Symposium, Rebecca Adamson of First Peoples Worldwide illustrates alternative economic systems modeled after indigenous worldviews and the power they have in pushing us towards a more sustainable existence.
Rebecca Adamson: Enoughness - Restoring Balance to the Economy
An Introduction to the Political Theory of John Maynard Keynes. John Maynard Keynes was arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century. He discovered the idea that governments should stimulate demand during economic downturns.
An Introduction to the Political Theory of John Maynard Keynes
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".
The Austrian Tradition in Economics
In this article, Rob Hoveman breaks down concepts like historical materialism and materialist analysis that are pivotal to understand Marx. He argues that abstractions are necessary for a concrete analysis of society that in turn should inform political practice.
Marx and historical materialism
Ricardo Hausmann says the new industrial policy is an information revelation process about the state of possibilities, the nature of the obstacles and figuring out whether you can sort out the obstacles so that these new activities can take over.
Industrial Policy: Love it or Hate it?
Exploring Economics, an open-source e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to discover & study a variety of economic theories, topics, and methods.
A Time for Precaution
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
Trickle Down Economics - an old topic, but still present in our lives. The idea consists of deregulation of the economy and of lower tax for the top in order to increase the "size of the pie" so everybody would have a bigger piece, even with a smaller share.
A critique to Trickle-down economics
During his life, Keynes was credited with, amongst other things, with helping to save capitalism from the Great Depression, funding the war against the Nazis and building post-war decades of growth and rising prosperity. And when the global crisis struck in 2008, it was his ideas that the world's leaders turned to help avoid another depression.
Masters Of Money | John Maynard Keynes
Prof. Robert Wade (London School of Economics, UK) discusses industrial policy, the challenges of economic development for emerging countries like Brazil and...
Prof. Robert Wade discusses industrial policy - Rethinking the State
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.
Homo Economicus: Why are new year’s resolutions so difficult to maintain and economic models so bad at predicting our behaviour?
As tax day approached, St. Francis College Economics Professors launched their first Economics Week with three days of guest speakers and student research. Randall Wray explains some basic principles of Modern Monetary Theory.
Modern Money Theory for Beginners
This video provides a brief introduction to post-keynesian economics and how the school of thought would tackle climate change.
Clips on Climate: Postkeynesian Economics
In this video University of Warwick Economist Robert Akerlof provides an introduction to a new type of behavioral economics He explains how this type is being driven by a desire to understand how people are shaped by social interactions and what the economic consequences of this are He begins the …
Behavioral Economics: The Next Generation
Ce portrait de Ronald Coase brossé par Elodie bertrand chercheuse en histoire de la pensée économique permet de revenir sur son oeuvre avec un certain recul historique Sur la réception de ses travaux leurs sur interprétations et leur influence dans l économie de la deuxième moitié du XXème siècle en …
Ronald Coase, un siècle d’économie
Dans cette conférence André Orléan fondateur de l école hétérodoxe de l économie des conventions donne les enjeux d un tournant expérimental des sciences économiques L essor de l économie comportementale des RCT randomized controlled trials et de l analyse économétrique à partir d expériences naturelles histoire économique développement montre …
Le tournant expérimental en économie
Ce court article présente une approche de la monnaie comme élément actif - et non pas neutre - dans l'économie. Après avoir défendu l'idée que que la monnaie et le système monétaire sont à la fois cause du développement économique et de son effondrement, cet article présente un sept manières alternatives de concevoir cet objet.
Pour la démocratie monétaire
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