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from Lars Syll In mainstream economics, there’s — still — a lot of talk about ‘economic laws.’ The crux of these laws — and regularities — that allegedly exist in economics, is that they only hold ceteris paribus. That fundamentally means that these laws/regularities only hold when the right conditions are at hand for giving rise […]
from Crelis Rammelt and current issue of RWER Our presumed dominion over nature is an illusion. No matter how clever technological innovations may seem, they remain subject to the laws of thermodynamics. Consequently, a growth-centered capitalist economy finds itself trapped in futile attempts to completely decouple itself from nature – aiming for a 100% circular, service-oriented and […]
from Lars Syll No sooner had I finished my comment on the irrelevancy of economics but I had confirmation — albeit unwittingly — in this morning’s Financial Times. There on the editorial page was a short column by Soumaya Keynes talking about the rise of Hank. For those of you not on the cutting edge, […]
from Peter Radford What are we to say of a discipline that steadfastly ignores reality in its pursuit of ever more formality in its methods? Wow. Steve Levitt has really shaken me. I come not to mock, but to follow up … Stand up and take a bow Ben Moll! You daring soul. Clearly I […]
from Junaid Jahangir and current issue of RWER [Ha-Joon] Chang’s latest book Edible Economics (2022) crystallizes the narrative that he has developed through his popular books over the years. . . . I have reviewed the salient ideas as follows in a bid to draw out lessons I could share with my ECON 101 students. […]
from Lars Syll Unlike anthropologists … economists simply invent the primitive societies we study, a practice which frees us from limiting ourselves to societies which can be physically visited as sparing us the discomforts of long stays among savages. This method of society-invention is the source of the utopian character of economics; and of the […]
from a comment by Ikonoclast “A truth is permitted only a brief victory celebration between the two long periods where it is first condemned as paradoxical and later disparaged as trivial.” – Arthur Schopenhauer. As they break new ground, the Capital as Power theoreticians will encounter the “Schopenhauer Effect” over and over. When you point […]
from Blair Fix and current issue of RWER Speaking of competition and losers, Ronald Reagan set the tone of the neoliberal era when, in 1981, he fired 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers (Houlihan, 2021). The message? Workers were losers who would be subjected to the discipline of competition. Reagan called it ‘morning in America’. But really, it was […]
from Giandomenico Scarpelli and current issue of RWER As documented in the previous paragraph, in recent years it finally seems that most orthodox economists have become more aware of the catastrophic outcomes of climatic disturbances; but at this point the traditional policy they recommend could be insufficient to meet the goals set at international level. […]
from Asad Zaman Introduction At first glance, it appears that industrialization, with its rampant overproduction and overconsumption, stands as the primary antagonist in our climate crisis narrative. However, this surface-level perception overlooks a more profound shift that lies beneath: an epistemological revolution birthed in the European Enlightenment. This era marked a pivotal transition in our […]