Departments

;

economics

  • SOURCE: Foreign Policy
    3/11/2022

    We're Talking about Climate Change with Outdated Colonial Language

    by Priya Satia

    The dominant climate activist theme of sacrificing in the present to protect the future is rooted in the intellectual history of economics which has driven the profligate consumption and gross inequality that threatens the planet. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    3/9/2022

    Bad Economics

    by Simon Torracinta

    A historian of science reviews three books on the history of economic thought, which support the conclusion that the ideas animating the mainstream of the discipline and enabling it to dominate discussions of policy are badly in need of reexamination. 

  • SOURCE: Platform
    11/1/2021

    How Academia Laid the Groundwork for Redlining

    by Todd Michney and LaDale Winling

    Richard T. Ely and his student Ernest McKinley Fisher pushed the National Association of Real Estate Boards to adopt "the unsupported hypothesis that Black people's very presence inexorably lowered property values," tying the private real estate industry to racial segregation. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    9/22/2021

    Why Are Moderate Dems Trying to Blow Up Biden's Economic Plan?

    by Zachary D. Carter

    Centrists' efforts to chisel away at the Build Back Better bill threaten its passage, its effectiveness, and the prospects of Democrats to hold power in the future. A biographer of John Maynard Keynes wonders why they're doing it. 

  • SOURCE: Aeon
    8/3/2021

    In Praise of Possibility

    by Michele Alacevich

    Albert O. Hirschman's approach to development economics stressed the need to understand "hidden rationalities" of developing societies and use them to create change.

  • SOURCE: London Review of Books
    4/15/2021

    The Gatekeeper

    by Adam Tooze

    Paul Krugman's career as a politically influential economist has reflected the political dead end of the Clinton-era ideal of technocratic governing. His new book suggests that the intellectual authority of the economics profession may no longer prevent active government or deficit spending. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    3/11/2021

    The Coronavirus Killed the Gospel of Small Government

    by Zachary D. Carter

    Revisiting the work of Keynes highlights the fact that struggles to deal with the pandemic are not only public health failures but economic failures — an inability to marshal resources to solve a problem. 

  • SOURCE: Harvard Magazine
    12/16/2020

    The American Exception: How Faith Shapes Economic and Social Policy

    by Benjamin M. Friedman

    Historian Benjamin Friedman's new book examines the importance of changing religious ideas in American Protestantism as influences on the development of social and economic policy. Part of the concluding chapter is excerpted here. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    12/2/2020

    The Gadfly of American Plutocracy (Review)

    by Simon Torracinta

    A new biography of the social theorist examines how his approach to understanding a past gilded age can offer lessons for our present one. 

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg
    9/21/2020

    Look What Has Been Taken From Black Americans

    It's difficult to quantify the financial cost to Black Americans of racism and segregation. But the destruction of property and denial of trade by white mobs in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919 was quantified by Ida B. Wells-Barnett; her findings can put the scope of a reparations program into some perspective.

  • SOURCE: Frank Interviews
    9/10/2020

    The Debt We Still Owe

    Economist Sandy Darity summarizes the case for reparations through the persistent Black-White wealth gap. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    8/6/2020

    The Real Reason the American Economy Boomed After World War II

    by Jim Tankersley

    Citing recent economic research, the author argues that fighting employment discrimination and ending the idea that white men have a privileged claim on good jobs will be a potent engine for economic growth if and when America recovers from the pandemic. 

  • SOURCE: Current Affairs
    6/9/2020

    Capitalism as Religion (Review Essay)

    Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity examines the ways in which capitalism, despite its purported scientific rationality, operates as a perverse kind of religion.