A Radical New Approach to the Field of Economics

Anwar Shaikh has been teaching economics at The New School for 42 years. One of the world’s leading heterodox economists, he argues that the neoclassical models taught at most universities are bad tools for analyzing capitalism. He hopes that his recent book, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict and Crisis, can be ...

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A Radical New Approach to the Field of Economics

Economic Globalization and Mental Health

Individual suffering in social context

Economic globalization is much in the news these days, most recently as Congress debated President Obama’s proposal for a “free trade” agreement with the nations of the Pacific Rim. My impression is that few mental health professionals keep up with the details of economic globalization and its impact ...

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The Invention of Money

The invention of money -- discussed last week by Julia Ott -- is one of the greatest of all human inventions, comparable to the invention of the wheel, if not quite up to the discovery of fire. If we situate this invention in the context of the class we can ...
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Put out the FIRE (in GDP)!

No one can escape discussions about the state of "the economy." They inform political campaigns in the U.S., debt and austerity battles in the Eurozone, and development efforts in the poorest countries in the world. Our ideas about "the economy" -- how it works, what it involves, and how it ...

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Rethinking Capitalism

Capitalism, by its nature, cannot be understood through the lens of any one discipline. Most importantly, it is not fully comprehensible by economics; there is no such thing as an economic theory of capitalism. Philosophy is important, for example to understand the moral standing of capitalism, but it is scarcely ...
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