A user’s guide to economics
The author of Economics: A User’s Guide breaks down the scientific aspirations – or pretensions – of neoclassical economics:
Source: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13830
Real-world microeconomics
Here’s an introductory textbook – written by Econ4’s Jerry Friedman – that not only covers the usual micro topics but goes beyond, putting the economic behavior of consumers and firms into its social context:
This unique textbook covers all the standard topics of an introductory microeconomics course, including the profit-maximizing firm, the utility-maximizing consumer, supply and demand, price and income elasticities, factors of production and their marginal products, and so on. But this book does much more: it offers both an alternative vision of microeconomics—placing individual decision-making in the context of social norms and institutions—and cogent criticism of neoclassical theory. Students using this book will get more than just an introduction to mainstream microeconomics—they will gain a deeper and more critical understanding of it.
Read more about Microeconomics: Individual Choice in Communities here.
Read more about other economics textbooks from Dollars and Sense here.
Innovation for the future economy: solar roadways
A century ago, cities were “drowning in horse manure.” Today we are drowning in fossil fuel emissions. It’s time for the transportation revolution of the 21st century. Maybe this will be part of it:
Source: http://paksc.org/video/documentaries/246-solar-roadways-the-prototype
Divestment pressure mounts
This week’s student protests put the heat on Harvard:
“Throughout Harvard heat week, Harvard’s top decision-makers have been hiding from both their students and from the issue of climate justice,” protesters wrote in a statement on Wednesday. “They must face the broad, diverse, and growing coalition behind divestment from fossil fuels.”
Read more coverage here and here. And check out the Divest Harvard facebook page here.
The Next System Project
A new project from Econ4’s Gar Alperovitz and many more:
Learn more about the Next System Project here.
Stranded asset denial
John Ashton, formerly Britain’s top climate diplomat, writes in an open letter to the president of Shell Oil:
You deny your assets will be stranded. True, first tier assets are cheap, and those that are heavily invested in tend to bear fruit quickly. But your case also assumes failure on 2C and rates of renewables deployment long surpassed by reality.
The Bank of England is watching the carbon bubble. Bloomberg screens include a carbon risk valuation tool. The divestment movement may still be small but it is rallying young people, has moral authority, and can now make a prudential case as well as an environmental one.
Writing on the wall. Story of the world.
You could accept squarely that the days of yesterday’s business model are numbered, that the challenge now is to manage its decline and build alongside it a new business fit for today.
Stranded fossil assets
Bill McKibben writing in The Guardian on the coming shift in the world energy economy:
What in 2013 was the rallying cry of a few student campaigners has by 2015 become the conventional wisdom: there’s a “carbon bubble,” composed of the trillions of dollars of coal and oil and gas that simply must be left underground. Here’s the president of World Bank speaking in Davos: “Use smart due diligence. Rethink what fiduciary responsibility means in this changing world. It’s simple self-interest. Every company, investor and bank that screens new and existing investments for climate risk is simply being pragmatic….”
Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, did his best to explain the unwelcome news to the industry at a conference last October: the “vast majority” of the planet’s carbon reserves “are unburnable,” he said. When Shell’s chief executive hit back last month, calling a rapid transition off fossil fuel “simply naïve,” it was Tory veteran and chair of parliament’s energy committee Tim Yeo who told him off: “I do believe the problem of stranded assets is a real one now. Investors are starting to think by 2030 the world will be in such a panic about climate change that either by law or by price it will be very hard to burn fossil fuels on anything like the scale we are doing at the moment.”
Read his analysis here.
Monopoly power v. solar power
The Washington Post reports from the electricity battleground in the clean energy transition, where surprising political realignments are emerging:
“Conservatives support solar — they support it even more than progressives do,” said Bryan Miller, co-chairman of the Alliance for Solar Choice and a vice president of public policy for Sunrun, a California solar provider. “It’s about competition in its most basic form. The idea that you should be forced to buy power from a state-sponsored monopoly and not have an option is about the least conservative thing you can imagine.”
Read more here.
Banned in China: know your air
The powerful film (with English subtitles) on pollution – initially hailed, then banned, by Chinese officialdom:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM
From New York Times story on the ban:
On Friday evening [the day the film was banned], Xinhua, the state news agency, posted on Twitter, which is also blocked here, that “President Xi Jinping vows to punish, with an iron hand, any violators who destroy ecology or environment, with no exceptions.” That night, the United States Embassy air monitor in Beijing rated the air “hazardous.”
Read more here.
POSTSCRIPT: Chinese officials are not the alone in trying to suppress bad news on the environment. Check out the latest from Florida, here.
Guaranteed income from common wealth
Peter Barnes writes in Yes! magazine:
THERE’S LONG been a notion that, because money is a prerequisite for survival and security, everyone should be assured some income just for being alive. The notion has been advanced by liberals such as James Tobin, John Kenneth Galbraith, and George McGovern, and by conservatives like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Richard Nixon. It’s embedded in the board game Monopoly, in which all players get equal payments when they pass Go. And yet, with one exception, Americans have been unable to agree on any plan that guarantees some income to everyone. The reasons lie mostly in the stories that surround such income. Is it welfare? Is it redistribution? Does it require higher taxes and bigger government? Americans think dimly of all these things.
But then, there’s the exception.
Read all about it here.
