Universal basic assets
Econ4’s Jim Boyce and Peter Barnes, author of With Liberty and Dividends for All, break down how universal basic income could be funded by common wealth:
The wealth we inherit and create together is worth trillions of dollars, yet we presently derive almost no income from it. Our joint inheritance includes invaluable gifts of nature such as our atmosphere, minerals and fresh water, and socially created assets such as our legal and financial infrastructure, without which private corporations couldn’t exist, much less thrive. If our common assets were better managed, they could pay every American, including children, several hundred dollars a month.
Read their piece here.
Climate change and the limits of cost-benefit analysis
Econ4’s James Boyce explains why “efficiency” may be a poor basis for deciding whether to save the planet:
Source: Real News Network.
Unlocking our climate wealth
Econ4’s James Boyce on how to translate good principles into good practice:
Source: http://tedxtraversecity.com/videos/
Econ4: Changing the Way We Look at Economics
Fast Company (fastcoexist.com) reports on Econ4:
“We’re economists: we want to promote not only the supply of new economics teaching but also student demand for it.”
Read the story and accompanying interview here.
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.
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.
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.
Environmentalism's Original Sin
“When the choice is framed as Humans versus Nature, it turns out that most people will choose Humans. If environmentalism is to win the future, we must move beyond this false dichotomy.” Read it here.
Tax Havens or Financial Sinkholes?
Great article from James K. Boyce, originally published on Triple Crisis. Read it here.
