What’s Wrong with Economics?
What’s Wrong with Economics?

Author: Robert Skidelsky

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0300252765

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A passionate and informed critique of mainstream economics from one of the leading economic thinkers of our time This insightful book looks at how mainstream economics’ quest for scientific certainty has led to a narrowing of vision and a convergence on an orthodoxy that is unhealthy for the field, not to mention the societies which base policy decisions on the advice of flawed economic models. Noted economic thinker Robert Skidelsky explains the circumstances that have brought about this constriction and proposes an approach to economics which includes philosophy, history, sociology, and politics. Skidelsky’s clearly written and compelling critique takes aim at the way that economics is taught in today’s universities, where a focus on modelling leaves students ill-equipped to grapple with what is important and true about human life. He argues for a return to the ideal set out by John Maynard Keynes that the economist must be a “mathematician, historian, statesman, [and] philosopher” in equal measure.

A Guide to What's Wrong with Economics
A Guide to What's Wrong with Economics

Author: Edward Fullbrook

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0857287370

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During a time of accelerating momentum for radical change in the study of economics, 'A Guide to What's Wrong with Economics' comprehensively re-examines the shortcomings of neoclassical economics and considers a number of alternative formulations.

Narrative Economics
Narrative Economics

Author: Robert J. Shiller

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0691212074

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From Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a groundbreaking account of how stories help drive economic events—and why financial panics can spread like epidemic viruses Stories people tell—about financial confidence or panic, housing booms, or Bitcoin—can go viral and powerfully affect economies, but such narratives have traditionally been ignored in economics and finance because they seem anecdotal and unscientific. In this groundbreaking book, Robert Shiller explains why we ignore these stories at our peril—and how we can begin to take them seriously. Using a rich array of examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that influence individual and collective economic behavior—what he calls "narrative economics"—may vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises and other major economic events. The result is nothing less than a new way to think about the economy, economic change, and economics. In a new preface, Shiller reflects on some of the challenges facing narrative economics, discusses the connection between disease epidemics and economic epidemics, and suggests why epidemiology may hold lessons for fighting economic contagions.

Rethinking Economics
Rethinking Economics

Author: Liliann Fischer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-22

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1315407248

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Economics is a broad and diverse discipline, but most economics textbooks only cover one way of thinking about the economy. This book provides an accessible introduction to nine different approaches to economics: from feminist to ecological and Marxist to behavioural. Each chapter is written by a leading expert in the field described and is intended to stand on its own as well as providing an ambitious survey that seeks to highlight the true diversity of economic thought. Students of economics around the world have begun to demand a more open economics education. This book represents a first step in creating the materials needed to introduce new and diverse ideas into the static world of undergraduate economics. This book will provide context for undergraduate students by placing the mainstream of economic thought side by side with more heterodox schools. This is in keeping with the Rethinking Economics campaign which argues that students are better served when they are presented with a spectrum of economic ideas rather than just the dominant paradigm. Rethinking Economics: An Introduction to Pluralist Economics is a great entry-level economics textbook for lecturers looking to introduce students to the broader range of ideas explored within the economics profession. It is also appropriate and accessible for people outside of academia who are interested in economics and economic theory.

What's the Use of Economics?
What's the Use of Economics?

Author: Diane Coyle

Publisher: London School of Economics and Political Science

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 9781907994043

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The gap between important real-word problems and the workhorse mathematical model-based economics being taught to students has become a chasm. This book examines what economists need to bring to their jobs, and the way in which economics education in universities could be improved to fit them better for the real world.

What Every Economics Student Needs to Know and Doesn't Get in the Usual Principles Text
What Every Economics Student Needs to Know and Doesn't Get in the Usual Principles Text

Author: John Komlos

Publisher: M.E. Sharpe

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0765643715

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This short book explores a core group of 40 topics that tend to go unexplored in an Introductory Economics course. Though not a replacement for an introductory text, the work is intended as a supplement to provoke further thought and discussion by juxtaposing blackboard models of the economy with empirical observations.

Cogs and Monsters
Cogs and Monsters

Author: Diane Coyle

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0691231036

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How economics needs to change to keep pace with the twenty-first century and the digital economy Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and AI are revolutionizing both the tools of economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape. In Cogs and Monsters, Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems—but also opportunities—facing economics today and examines what it must do to help policymakers solve the world’s crises, from pandemic recovery and inequality to slow growth and the climate emergency. Mainstream economics, Coyle says, still assumes people are “cogs”—self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined contexts. But the digital economy is much more characterized by “monsters”—untethered, snowballing, and socially influenced unknowns. What is worse, by treating people as cogs, economics is creating its own monsters, leaving itself without the tools to understand the new problems it faces. In response, Coyle asks whether economic individualism is still valid in the digital economy, whether we need to measure growth and progress in new ways, and whether economics can ever be objective, since it influences what it analyzes. Just as important, the discipline needs to correct its striking lack of diversity and inclusion if it is to be able to offer new solutions to new problems. Filled with original insights, Cogs and Monsters offers a road map for how economics can adapt to the rewiring of society, including by digital technologies, and realize its potential to play a hugely positive role in the twenty-first century.

Debunking Economics
Debunking Economics

Author: Steve Keen

Publisher: Zed Books

Published: 2001-07-28

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9781856499927

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What is the score card for economics at the start of the new millennium? While there are many different schools of economic thought, it is the neo-classical school, with its alleged understanding and simplistic advocacy of the market, that has become equated in the public mind with economics. This book shows that virtually every aspect of conventional neo-classical economics' thinking is intellectually unsound. Steve Keen draws on an impressive array of advanced critical thinking. He constitutes a profound critique of the principle concepts, theories, and methodologies of the mainstream discipline. Keen raises grave doubts about economics' pretensions to established scientific status and its reliability as a guide to understanding the real world of economic life and its policy-making.

Doughnut Economics
Doughnut Economics

Author: Kate Raworth

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2018-03-08

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1603587969

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Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike. That’s why it is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth, to revise our economic thinking for the 21st century. In Doughnut Economics, she sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Along the way, she points out how we can break our addiction to growth; redesign money, finance, and business to be in service to people; and create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design. Named after the now-iconic “doughnut” image that Raworth first drew to depict a sweet spot of human prosperity (an image that appealed to the Occupy Movement, the United Nations, eco-activists, and business leaders alike), Doughnut Economics offers a radically new compass for guiding global development, government policy, and corporate strategy, and sets new standards for what economic success looks like. Raworth handpicks the best emergent ideas—from ecological, behavioral, feminist, and institutional economics to complexity thinking and Earth-systems science—to address this question: How can we turn economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, into economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow? Simple, playful, and eloquent, Doughnut Economics offers game-changing analysis and inspiration for a new generation of economic thinkers.

Money and Government
Money and Government

Author: Robert Skidelsky

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 030024424X

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A critical examination of economics' past and future, and how it needs to change, by one of the most eminent political economists of our time The dominant view in economics is that money and government should play only minor roles in economic life. Economic outcomes, it is claimed, are best left to the "invisible hand" of the market. Yet these claims remain staunchly unsettled. The view taken in this important new book is that the omnipresence of uncertainty makes money and government essential features of any market economy. Since Adam Smith, classical economics has espoused non-intervention in markets. The Great Depression brought Keynesian economics to the fore; but stagflation in the 1970s brought a return to small-state orthodoxy. The 2008 global financial crash should have brought a reevaluation of that stance; instead the response has been punishing austerity and anemic recovery. This book aims to reintroduce Keynes’s central insights to a new generation of economists, and embolden them to return money and government to the starring roles in the economic drama that they deserve.