Philosophy & Ethics

Economics is not, nor can it be, value-free.

In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

A transition from the conventional policy of “redistributing income” to “redistributing membership”, could promote economic integration across communities and intergenerational mobility.

What happens when a market-based economy becomes a market-based society?

A recent New York Times article observed that Americans want action to address inequality. 2016 presidential candidates from both parties also acknowledge that inequality is a pressing concern. But not one of the candidates has proposed to do anything meaningful about it, sharing wealthy Americans’ (understandable) opposition to any solution (Scheiber 2015). Perhaps nothing has been done because there is nothing to do about it.

In much of Europe, the social rights and social protections won in the first post-war decades, by labour movements in particular, have subsequently been seriously eroded, and are further threatened by neoliberal austerity.

This text is part of a research project still in working progress that collects different contributions by the author and rewrite and reanalyse some reflections, already present, in a different form, in some publications:

The vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years later, and the relevance of his economic ideas today

McCloskey discusses her career, critiques of economics, and offers advice for young economists.

Eurocentric modernism has unhinged us from our human nature, argues Rajani Kanth in his new book

Policies based on faith in the “market” as a principle of social organization have wrought havoc with a founding principle of American democracy

A presentation from The Economics of Post-Factual Democracy, the first annual conference of The Center for Information and Bubble Studies (CIBS) at The University of Copenhagen

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

Extract from the keynote speech by the Rev. Dr. William Barber III at the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference on race and economics in Detroit on November 11