History

Economics needs to better incorporate other social sciences

The Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Italian Association for the History of Political Economy (STOREP) announce a day and a half of lectures, workshops, and debates held on the 26th and 27th of June, just before the annual STOREP conference, in Siena, Italy.

Shaped by the 2008 financial crisis, a new generation of economists is expanding the boundaries of economic thinking on credit cycles, private debt, and financial stability.

Ben Power, who adapted the play “The Lehman Trilogy,” talks about the eponymous family’s role in the creation and destruction of American wealth

Returns on wealth exceed growth for more countries, more years, and more dramatically than Piketty has found

The state has long used law to back private money—with dire consequences, then and now

For all the talk of Modern Monetary Theory representing a brave new frontier, it is easy to forget that the United States has gone down this road before, when the US Federal Reserve financed the war effort in the 1940s. Then, as now, the question is not about government debt, but about the debt’s purpose and justification.

One of America’s leading socialists discusses how a collectively owned economy would be structured, the limits of the welfare state, and what Keynes understood that Marx didn’t

The Chicago School’s weakening of antitrust law hurt the economy

This paper presents an historical analysis of the antitrust laws.

Kristen Ghodsee discusses her research on how love and relationships function under socialism and capitalism, and what economists miss about the rise of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe

During her long career she illuminated many of the shortcomings of neoclassicism, and offered alternative paths

The heterodox scholar was a fierce critic of neoclassical economics. But she also insisted that economics be driven by science, not ideology.

Decades before it caught on with other economists, Sadie Alexander was the first economist to recommend a government jobs guarantee in the US

John Kenneth Galbraith noted in 1973 that establishment economics had become the “invaluable ally of those whose exercise of power depends on an acquiescent public.” If anything, economists’ embrace of that role has grown stronger since then.