Written by John LounsburyPBS Frontline has an informative program investigating the nature of domestic conspiracies in the United States. The first broadcast was aired 28 July 2020 and an updated broadcast on 11 January 2021. Both broadcasts are available below.
not. It’s not about supply-side economics, which is sometimes called ‘top-down’ economics.
Instead, I use the phrase ‘economics from the top down’ to mean two things. First, it’s a philosophical approach to studying human society. It’s an alternative to the ‘bottom-up’ approach that’s most common in economics. In the bottom-up approach, you first postulate simple principles of human behavior. You then use these ‘microfoundations’ to explain the behavior of groups of people.
I think this approach is misguided. It’s the equivalent of trying to explain individual behavior using postulates about how cells behave. It’s not that the bottom-up approach is impossible - clearly individuals interact to create group behavior (just as human cells interact to create individual behavior). The problem is that this bottom-up approach is far beyond our present abilities. We have no universal theory of human behavior (just as we have no universal theory of how cells beh
Written by John Lounsbury
In June 2017 Richard D. Wolff addressed a Talks at Google session in New York. This was a discussion of the history of economic theory from the viewpoint of the conflicting views of capitalism presented by Karl Marx and other notable classical economists. The talk focuses on the shortcomings of capitalism and touches on what changes could be considered to improve capitalism.
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Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York City. He wrote Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism and founded www.democracyatwork.info, a non-profit advocacy organization of the same name that promotes democratic workplaces as a key path to a stronger, democr
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This week we have a discussion between David Graeber and Jonathan Conning, Associate Professor of Economics at Hunter College at the Graduate Center, CUNY. The discussion took place at Hunter College in April 2012. The topic was the book
Debt: The First 5000 Years.
From
Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter system-to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There s not a shred of evidence to support it.Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that 5,000 years ago, during the beginning of the agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems. It is in this era, Graeber shows, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Steve Keen presented an invited lecture to the Marshall Society at Cambridge University in early November. The 1-hour presentation reviews the failure of neo-classical economics with carefully derived analytical argument. This is unusual compared to some discussions by notable economists in that it is non-ideological, but based on empirical observations of macroeconomic systems.
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The Marshall Society is the Economics Society of the University of Cambridge. Established in 1927 in memory of Alfred Marshall, the Society has since upheld the tradition of its distinguished founders in furthering the discussion of economics. Former members of the Marshall Society include John Maynard Keynes, Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson and Manmohan Singh.