The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy; We’re All Dead – New on Our Bookshelf
This book is a call to restore economics to its roots in moral and cultural knowledge, reminding us that human beings are more than consumers.
Why Crowdfunding May Not Be the Great Democratising Force in Investment after All
“Initially, crowdfunding brought great optimism that it would have a “democratising effect” on finance. On the one hand it would enable entrepreneurs excluded from traditional sources of finance to attract funding. And, on the other, it would provide new opportunities for people with even relatively modest amounts of money to invest. […] Our work has reviewed the available research on crowdfunding to examine whether this relatively recent method of financing new and small businesses lives up to the lofty claims of democratising investment in the 21st century.”
Market-Based Policies Work to Fight Climate Change, from India to Jamaica
“I am an environmental economist, but it doesn’t require advanced training in economics to recognize the basic principles underlying all these conservative-backed environmental policies. […] Markets function properly only under certain conditions.”
How Corporations Are Stepping Up to Tackle Crises When Governments Won’t
“Today we’re facing a whole slew of social, economic and environmental crises—gun violence, climate change, gender inequality, job dislocation, food insecurity, plastic pollution and the opioid epidemic, to name just a few. […] What’s interesting is how often corporations are stepping in to fill the void.”
Should We Be Anxious about the Future of Capitalism?
“Sassoon, Emeritus Professor of Comparative European History at Queen Mary, is hardly a dyed-in-the-wool free marketeer, and The Anxious Triumph; A Global History of Capitalism 1860-1914 is by no means a celebration of capitalism. There are frequent swipes at neoliberalism, free-market ideology and ‘untrammelled individualism’. […] But to this laissez-faire reader, the big-picture lesson from Anxious Triumph is an encouraging one, and all the more so for the fact that its author likely disagrees with me on quite a lot.”
What Economists Still Need to Learn
“More than a decade after the global financial crisis, macroeconomists have failed to absorb three crucial sets of lessons. Their models are still struggling – and mostly failing – to cope with disruptive change, and with the fact that both balance sheets and inequality matter.”
A Globalised Solar-Powered Future Is Wholly Unrealistic – And Our Economy Is the Reason Why
“the ultimate obstruction is not a question of human morality but of our common faith in what Marx called ‘money fetishism’. We collectively delegate responsibility for our future to a mindless human invention – what Karl Polanyi called all-purpose money, the peculiar idea that anything can be exchanged for anything else. The aggregate logic of this relatively recent idea is precisely what is usually called ‘capitalism’. It defines the strategies of corporations, politicians, and citizens alike.”
How Business Schools Can Help Restore Trust in Capitalism
“So far, most business schools (including Stanford where I teach) have responded to this trust challenge by offering more programs and courses on ethics, social entrepreneurship, impact investing, and philanthropy, with the message that we need better private-sector solutions to social problems. This approach won’t cut it.”
6 Ways CEOs Can Prove They Care About More Than Shareholder Value
“For 181 of America’s leading CEOs to publicly break rank is hugely significant. But, as several commentators note, what really matters is what they do next. There is a narrow window of opportunity within which to prove that stakeholder capitalism is more than self-serving PR.
So what actions should the 181 CEOs and their boards consider taking to prove that they do mean business? We suggest that they show decisive leadership in, at minimum, one of the following six areas:
Grace Blakeley’s ‘Stolen’ Is a Tired Invective against Market Capitalism
“Grace Blakeley’s Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation […] is not a good book. Its invective against capitalism cherry-picks the evidence and disregards the dramatic economic growth of non-Western countries, home to 80% of the world’s population, since 1980. Furthermore, the book’s case for a state takeover of most capital allocation in the economy takes no account of the gross mismanagement, environmental degradation, and human suffering associated with twentieth-century experiments with socialism, to which contemporary Venezuela is a particularly tragic sequel.”
