Economics 4 People
From the Valley Advocate of Northampton, Mass.:
Popular economics education? The phrase seems oxymoronic. What field is more institutionalized and less popularized than economics?
Yet here is Econ4, a new initiative floating around the outskirts of economic academia, aiming to “end intellectual monoculture in the economics profession.”
Why are they doing this? And just what do they hope to accomplish?
“In the wake of the financial crisis, there was a need and demand for a better understanding of economics, more rooted in reality,” James Boyce tells me as we talk in his office. “You can’t delegate this stuff to the high priests of academia, Wall Street, and the Treasury Department.”
Read more here.
Cap-and-dividend climate policy
This short cartoon from www.capanddividend.org lays out how a cap-and-dividend climate policy would work:
Source: Cap’n Dividend.
The case for true-cost pricing: Indian Point nuclear plant
“Indian Point: The Next Fukushima?” Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Victor Gilinsky, writing in The New York Times:
Some 160,000 Japanese are still displaced because the radioactive contamination — in an area far less populated and less dense than the New York area — was so intense and far-reaching. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s cost-benefit analyses for Indian Point and other nuclear plants in the United States do not factor in these possibilities.
Read the entire piece here.
Econ4 in Chronicle of Higher Ed
Recently critics have mounted a more fundamental line of attack on mainstream economists, taking aim at the ideology that has grown dominant over the past 30 years, which they say played a significant part in causing the Great Recession and not doing much to help solve it.
Read the entire piece here.
The High Price of Materialism
A new video from the Center for a New American Dream.
Source: http://www.newdream.org/resources/high-price-of-materialism
“Get It Done”
Youth delegate Anjali Appadurai at the Durban climate summit.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko3e6G_7GY4.
Market share among U.S. banks
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/12/11/magazine/11economy2.html?ref=magazine.
From the same issue of the Times, Gretchen Morgenson’s excellent piece on TBTF (too big to fail):
Reducing the perils of gargantuan institutions — and the threat to taxpayers — is an idea that seems to be taking hold in Washington. To be sure, the army arguing for change is far outgunned by the battalions of bankers and lobbyists working to maintain the status quo. But some combatants seeking reform believe they are making headway.
Read it here.
Make More Videos
From Ben, November 28, 2011:
Make more videos. Your audience is waiting.
Econ4 replies:
Thanks, Ben. That’s exactly what we want to do. We are now seeking funding to make it possible.
Economics 4 People, the Planet, and the Future
From James Boyce’s post on the TripleCrisis blog:
Our current economic crisis is not only a crisis of the economy. It is also a crisis of economics. The free-market fundamentalism of the closing decades of the 20th century today has been thoroughly discredited – or at least, should have been – by financial collapse, swelling inequality, global imbalances, mass unemployment, and environmental degradation.
Read the rest of the article here.
Wanted: Worldly Philosophers
Economists should see the big picture – and ask the big questions. But in a recent oped piece, Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman argue that the profession has been so preoccupied with the trees that it lost sight of the forest:
It’s become commonplace to criticize the ‘Occupy’ movement for failing to offer an alternative vision. But the thousands of activists in the streets of New York and London aren’t the only ones lacking perspective: economists, to whom we might expect to turn for such vision, have long since given up thinking in terms of economic systems — and we are all the worse for it.
Read their piece here.
