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from Richard Parker and RWER issue 106 Back in the late 1960s, a tiny band of unconventional economists encountered an environmentalism in the midst of radical rethinking. Prompted by Carson’s Silent Spring, capitalism and its science were being accused of major crimes—against nature, our fellow species and humankind itself. Hiroshima had shattered confidence in the benignity of Progress, […]
from Lars Syll We certainly agree that regularities or models that explain or that give heuristic value over many different cases are highly desirable. But ones that do neither are not — especially if they use up huge resources along the way. When looking at the details, the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s explanatory record so far is […]
from Victor Beker and RWER issue 106 There was a time when it was thought that the main task of economics was to assure economic growth. For example, John M. Keynes predicted that “the day is not far off when the Economic Problem will take the back seat where it belongs” (Keynes 1931: 6). Then, once […]
from Richard Norgaard and RWER issue 106 I object to the question on which this volume focuses. It assumes that biophysical limits are real and knowable rather than a human construct associated with a particular understanding of how natural systems might behave. Limits have been an extremely useful construct for critiquing the even simpler construct […]
from Lars Syll In a word, Economics is an Impossible Science because by its own definition the determining conditions of the economy are not economic: they are “exogenous.” Supposedly a science of things, it is by definition without substance, being rather a mode of behavior: the application of scarce means to alternative ends so as […]
from Ping Chen and RWER issue 107 Economic Complexity vs. Neoclassical Simplicity Complexity science originated from astrophysics when Henri Poincaré discovered the three-body problem had no analytical solution in 1899. The discovery and development of deterministic chaos in the 1960s to 1990s found wide evidence that nonlinear deterministic systems only have limited predictability. Ilya Prigogine further […]
from Dean Baker In prior decades we in the US used to try to restrict the ability of the rich and very rich to buy elections. We have limits on campaign contributions to candidates and political parties. Until the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Citizens United case, corporations were prohibited altogether from contributing to politicians […]
from Asad Zaman and WEA Pedological Blog In the previous section, we saw how economic theories changed from classical to Keynesian to Monetarist over the course of the 20th century. These changes were driven by historical events. Taking this historical context into account deepens our understanding of economic theories. This contrasts with conventional methodology of economic […]
from Maria Alejandra Madi and RWER issue 106 Anthropogenic climate change and ecological breakdown are now major threats to human life and other species. It is widely acknowledged that mainstream economic theory and especially neoclassical theory lack adequate concepts to address these problems and arguably have contributed to them through misdirection and delay. “Complexity” sciences, […]