Search results
Today, in many countries what is viewed as ‘credible’ economic knowledge stems from academic economics. The discipline of academic economics is based in universities across the world that employ economists who produce research that is published in academic journals and educate students who then go into government, businesses, and think tanks. Through the book’s authors’ and contributors’ experiences of economics education, and as part of the international student movement Rethinking Economics, it argues that academic economics in its current state does not provide people with the knowledge that we need to build thriving economies that allows everyone to flourish wherever they are from in the world, and whatever their racialised identity, gender or socioeconomic background. The consequences of this inadequate education links to modern economies being a root cause of systemic racism and sexism, socioeconomic inequality, and the ecological crisis. When economies are rooted in a set of principles that values whiteness, maleness and wealth, we should not be surprised by the inequalities that show up. Structural inequalities need systemic change, change that infiltrates through every level of the system, otherwise we risk reproducing and deepening them. This book makes the case that in order to reclaim economics it is necessary to diversify, decolonise and democratise how economics is taught and practised, and by whom. It calls on everyone to do what we can to reclaim economics for racial justice, gender equality and future generations.
services in particular. Far from a return to an old model that appeared to work, the Irish economy has become more dependent on its status as a tax haven. This makes the country even more vulnerable to external shocks generated by changes in tax policies in other countries. The populist right The mainstream of the Irish economics profession has developed close connections with the Irish political elite and have provided an intellectual framework to justify its austerity policies. However, a more radical and populist discourse has also emerged to target state spending as
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) returned to public discourse in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union imploded and globalization erupted. Best known for The Great Transformation, Polanyi’s wide-ranging thought anticipated twenty-first-century civilizational challenges of ecological collapse, social disintegration and international conflict, and warned that the unbridled domination of market capitalism would engender nationalist protective counter-movements. In Karl Polanyi and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, Radhika Desai and Kari Polanyi Levitt bring together prominent and new thinkers in the field to extend the boundaries of our understanding of Polanyi's life and work. Kari Polanyi Levitt's opening essay situates Polanyi in the past century shaped by Keynes and Hayek, and explores how and why his ideas may shape the twenty-first century. Her analysis of his Bennington Lectures, which pre-dated and anticipated The Great Transformation, demonstrates how Central European his thought and chief concerns were. The next several contributions clarify, for the first time in Polanyi scholarship, the meaning of money as a fictitious commodity. Other contributions resolve difficulties in understanding the building blocks of Polanyi's thought: fictitious commodities, the double movement, the United States' exceptional development, the reality of society and socialism as freedom in a complex society. The volume culminates in explorations of how Polanyi has influenced, and can be used to develop, ideas in a number of fields, whether income inequality, world-systems theory or comparative political economy. Contributors: Fred Block, Michael Brie, Radhika Desai, Michael Hudson, Hannes Lacher, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Chikako Nakayama, Jamie Peck, Abraham Rotstein, Margaret Somers, Claus Thomasberger, Oscar Ugarteche Galarza.
Over more than thirty years of reform and opening, the Chinese Communist Party has pursued the gradual marketization of China’s economy alongside the preservation of a resiliently authoritarian political system, defying long-standing predictions that ‘transition’ to a market economy would catalyse deeper political transformation. In an era of deepening synergy between authoritarian politics and finance capitalism, Communists constructing capitalism offers a novel and important perspective on this central dilemma of contemporary Chinese development. This book challenges existing state–market paradigms of political economy and reveals the Eurocentric assumptions of liberal scepticism towards Chinese authoritarian resilience. It works with an alternative conceptual vocabulary for analysing the political economy of financial development as both the management and exploitation of socio-economic uncertainty. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and over sixty interviews with policymakers, bankers, and former party and state officials, the book delves into the role of China’s state-owned banking system since 1989. It shows how political control over capital has been central to China’s experience of capitalist development, enabling both rapid economic growth whilst preserving macroeconomic and political stability. Communists constructing capitalism will be of academic interest to scholars and graduate students in the fields of Chinese studies, social studies of finance, and international and comparative political economy. Beyond academia, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Chinese capitalism and its implications for an increasingly central issue in contemporary global politics: the financial foundations of illiberal capitalism.
people the government stepped in and provided universal education to lift the masses up out of illiteracy, ignorance and superstition. This foundational myth is consistent with the current ‘vision and mission’ which is to expand the public production of education to reach everyone to provide equal opportunity to all children to have the education that prepares them to take their place in the world. What is most striking is that the economics profession – and in particular development economics and in particular the branch that gives ‘policy advice’ – which can normally
and how they should address a changing climate, the economics profession was on hand to provide the analysis demonstrating, for example, that the cost of curbing emissions or shifting to renewable energy was too great to justify (analysis, it should be emphasised, often funded by major fossil fuel producers). 10 In the fraught decades since, from proposals for carbon pricing in the United States to basic environmental protections and the adoption of the Kyoto Accord, a handful of economists and consulting firms have published
economic management. The Leave side of the Tory Party, Establishment and country had won. A vote for Brexit was also a vote of no confidence in economic experts and Treasury authority. From Martin Wolf's perspective: Brexit was a project carried through by people against the overwhelming view of the economics profession. So, Brexit has almost by definition had to say, ‘economists are useless because they disagree with us’, and since this government is still really only united by Brexit, economists and
worth recalling (Galbraith 1967 ); and some works on neoinstitutionalism, comparative political economy, and the economics of development. Most of the rest of the economics profession, however, views these approaches as tolerable at best. They lie safely on the remote periphery both of theoretical work and of teaching. Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe comes to mind here. Why did it remain dominant until the period from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries (and in Russia, with a mostly illiterate population, right up until the early twentieth century
that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – something that encouraged the growth of a highly technical, abstract, and formal economics profession, on the one hand, and a brand of political science that until very recently almost entirely ignored economic issues, on the other. 4 Of late, political economy has made an overdue and welcome come back, partly
the economics profession doesn’t recognise the scale of reform that is needed. It is easy to give up hope. To feel that the change we need isn’t possible. That is why we wanted to start this book with Joelle’s story. A Black American woman in a discipline that is all too often White 5 and dominated by men. An economist who has forcefully highlighted the deep-rooted problems