Pluralism Endures

Some good news for undergraduates at Notre Dame! Political economy courses will continue to be offered to undergraduates in the Fall of 2010. This includes courses on the Political Economy of Development, the Political Economy of the Financial Crisis, the Economics of War and Peace, and Marxian Economic Theory, among others. In addition, at least [...]

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Friday Links

Here are your Friday links. Also, yesterday we had our first post from Kasey Dufresne, a friend of Notre Dame interested in economic pluralism. Kasey will be holding down the fort next week while I’m on vacation and will be a great presence here in the future. Serious Links Ed Fullbrook is impressed by David [...]

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Reforming Economics

Freefall, Joseph Stiglitz’s most recent book on the economic crisis, contains an interesting chapter dedicated to “Reforming Economics” where the author explains that “Economics had moved… from being a scientific discipline into becoming free market capitalism’s biggest cheerleader.” For a mainstream economist, he makes some strong critiques of neoclassical economics. For example, he writes that [...]

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Does Internalizing Health Care Reduce Inequality?

A new NBER paper (h/t Thoma) by Richard Burkhauser and Kosali Simon says that it does. From the abstract:  We show that ignoring the value of health insurance coverage will substantially understate the level of economic well being of Americans and its upward trend and overstate the level of inequality and its upward trend. This [...]

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When We Underestimate Nature: Wolves and Bees

I saw a film last night called Lords of Nature: Life in a Land of Great Predators, which demonstrated that the elimination of great predators can have vast effects on their ecosystems. Predators in general have been run out of the lower 48 states; in particular, the absence of the wolf in places like Yellowstone [...]

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Friday Links

Only serious links today, sorry. Enjoy the weekend! Serious Ellen Brown on the movement for publicly-held banks- (YES!) Irony (or not), Texas, and Hayek- (Sociological Imagination) Bill Easterly also attacks the discrediting of Hayek based on citations (Aid Watch) Minsky and Ecology- (Macroeconomic Resilience) From last summer: Daniel Little on Polanyi- (Understanding Society) Rortybomb on [...]

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Is Alan Greenspan a Marxist?

Alan Greenspan will present a paper at Brookings tomorrow (I didn’t get an invite) on the causes of the financial crisis. According to the New York Times, Greenspan acknowledges that there was a bubble, but says that there would have been no way to identify it or pop it. Instead, he writes, Unless there is [...]

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Gratuitous Sports Post: Go Irish!

This post has literally nothing to do with economics. For basketball fans, however, Christmas has arrived. Even better, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish are in the tournament and are playing this afternoon. Go Irish! Beat Monarchs! Below are my picks…

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Rethinking the Social Division of Labor

Via Meteor Blades, Guernica has an article about how the social division of labor arose and how we might move beyond it as we recover from the current economic crisis. Instead of putting forward, as so many of our elected officials, policy analysts, pundits, and journalists predictably do, a picture of our world that is [...]

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The last couple months of global warming

This image should provide a nice response to any friends or otherwise who claim that this winter is evidence against global warming (not that intelligent people need further evidence). It shows departures from average surface temperatures from December, 2009 through February, 2010. (Photo is from NASA GISS via the Washington Post)

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