Category: History of Economic Thought

Economics Through the Lens of Women – A Review of Giandomenica Becchio’s A History of Feminist and Gender Economics

ritwikapatgiriLeave a comment

There is a long-standing debate on how economics as a subject is gender blind giving rise to various branches within the subject that seek to address ‘the woman question’ (as early feminism has been labeled) within the discipline. Giandomenica Becchio’s book A History of Feminist and Gender Economics is not merely an attempt to understand the history of economics and how the various dimensions of ‘the woman question’ have entered the discipline of economics over the years. The book also explores the work of women economists who mostly remained unheard in the discipline, the women who struggled to enter into the academic realm and the debates within these economists about addressing ‘the woman question’.

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Oikonomia is Back, for Now

assaj401Leave a comment

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Plato and Aristotle, at The School of Athens. Photo by By Raphael – Web Gallery of Art.

The current pandemic is a human tragedy on an enormous scale, not only in terms of death and illness but also in loss of employment, disruption to education and increased anxiety. Perhaps of most concern to politicians, the various restrictions put in place to reduce the spread of COVID-19 have had large negative effects on national and regional economies. 

As a result, many leaders have opted to ‘re-open’ their economies prematurely, partly since economic performance affects electoral cycles. In some cases there have been disastrous consequences to such loosening of social distancing restrictions, with spikes in infections in various countries or states. This has led to a discussion of a false dichotomy – between protecting human life and reviving the economy. 

This dichotomy is false for several reasons. At the most basic level, if large parts of the population get infected and either die or are unable to work, this would not bode well for the economy either. But more fundamentally, what we think of as ‘the economy’ is really broader than just profits and asset values. Read More »

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019)

Max AjlLeave a comment

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Photo: Brennan Cavanaugh

Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, historical social scientist, anti-colonial militant, world systems theorist, intellectual provocateur and polymath, has passed – and with him has passed the last giant of the golden age of anti-Eurocentric history. Wallerstein was born in 1930, educated at Columbia, from where he successively received BA, MA, and PhD degrees by 1959. From his early adulthood, he was seasoned and beguiled by national liberation struggles, reading the texts of Nehru and Gandhi, attending youth congresses alongside participants from African countries in the heat of anti-colonial militance. His earliest works focused on colonial and post-colonial African governments, including a number of neglected monographs and co-authored document collections on the African liberation movements.Read More »

Smithian or mercantilist nations? Two opposite models of development

Orlando N. Santos3 Comments

1024px-The_Battle_of_Cape_Passaro.jpgWhile classical political economy has been considered outdated by many social scientists, I argue here that it can provide insights about the world today and the challenges we face.[1] One of these insights has to do with the early disagreement that existed between Adam Smith and the mercantilists of his era with regards to the wealth of nations, a topic sometimes captured under the label “development”. Based on this disagreement, this blog post develops a typology of Smithian and Mercantilist nations as different models of capitalist development that may be considered alternatives for developing countries today.Read More »

Hirschman’s Linkages: Passé in the Age of Global Production Sharing?

Wannaphong durongkaveroj3 Comments

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How does economic development happen? After World War II, many development economists rose to prominence, such as Paul Rosenstein-Rodan (the big push), Arthur Lewis (the dual-sector model), Walter Rostow (the linear stages of growth) and Albert Hirschman (unbalanced growth and linkages). Given the continued importance of industrial policy, it is particularly worthwhile to revisit the idea of forward and backward linkages — one of the central tenets of development thinking pioneered by Hirschman.Read More »

Why so Hostile? Busting Myths about Heterodox Economics

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven13 Comments

Call-for-Application-Pluralist-Economics

By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven and Carolina Alves

“Economics is unique among the social sciences in having a single monolithic mainstream, which is either unaware of or actively hostile to alternative approaches.” (John King 2013: 17)

What does heterodox economics mean? Is the label helpful or harmful? Being outside of the mainstream of the Economics discipline, the way we position ourselves may be particularly important. For this reason, many around us shun the use of the term “heterodox” and advise against using it. However, we believe the reluctance to use the term stems in part from misunderstandings of (and sometimes disagreement over) what the term means and perhaps disagreements over strategies for how to change the discipline.

In other words, this is an important debate about both identification and strategy. In this blog, we wish to raise the issue in heterodox and mainstream circles, by busting a few common myths about Heterodox Economics – mostly stemming from the orthodoxy. This is a small part of a larger project on defining heterodox economics.

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Samir Amin and Beyond

Ingrid Harvold KvangravenLeave a comment

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By Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven and Maria Dyveke Styve

When the sad news came of Samir Amin’s passing on August 12th, 2018, a plethora of beautiful obituaries were published in his memory (see for example here, here, here or here). These have made it more than evident not only how important his scholarship and work through the World Social Forum is, but also what an extraordinary person he was. We never had the privilege of meeting Samir Amin in person, but he was very kind to grant us an interview over Skype for an e-book we put together in 2017 on the contemporary relevance of dependency theory (since published by the University of Zimbabwe Publishers). Now we wish to unpack his contributions to our understanding of political economy and uneven development, and explore how his ideas have been interpreted and adopted in different contexts, and their relevance today.

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