Irene van Staveren - Alternative Ideas from 10 (Almost) Forgotten Economists

Irene van Staveren

Alternative Ideas from 10 (Almost) Forgotten Economists

1st ed. 2021

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Alternative Ideas from 10 (Almost) Forgotten Economists brings alive for our time the most fundamental insights that economics has to offer, enabling readers to both better understand the world and empowering them to change it for the better. Irene van Staverens writing is a rare combination: clear, accessible, scholarly, passionate, and entertaining all at once.

Robert Pollin, Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Irenes book Alternative Ideas from 10 (Almost) Forgotten Economists makes it very clear that there is a rich diversity of ideas and theories.

A book you would want to read if you have limited time but want to know what is going on in the world of new, non-standard economic visions.

Written with passion, it inspires to read more about economists that you might have heard about for the very first time.

Peter Blom, CEO of Triodos Bank Group and co-founder and co-chair of theSustainable Finance Lab

The 2008 financial crisis offered an opportunity to change economicscritical economists like myself were optimistic about this. In June 2009, The British newsmagazine The Economist welcomed a long-awaited revision of economics programmes in colleges and universities, with a cover showing a melting textbook. But hardly anything changed in economics departments over the past decade. For about 40 years, it has been dominated by the neoclassical paradigm assuming self-interested and utility-maximizing agents expressing their exogenous and purely subjective preferences through demand and supply in free markets, constrained only by their resources.

Today, with a financial sector that has remained large and vulnerable, an economy generating rising inequality and rapid climate change, and which has shown to be very vulnerable to a pandemic, the world deserves even more urgently economic change as well as a change in economics that would help such a change materialize. But whereas most economists continue doing their highly specialized modelling and have adopted context-free randomized controlled trials as the golden standard for policy research, some even defend the current economic system capitalism as the best imaginable. They do so by arguing that the alternative is either North Korean style communism or anarchy.

The challenge is to change but not to abolish marketsthat would be foolish. Try to think of it. No labour market but some central planning agency that tells you which job to take or working for your own account but not being able to sell your goods or services to anyone. No product marketsbut how can you consume the basic necessities if you do not have the resources and skills to grow and manufacture them by yourself, or with your local community without any form of exchange to get resources from outside your community? And, indeed, no international trade at all. And no form of financial markets for savings, credit and investment. Not even a highly regulated one or one run entirely by state banks allocating demand and supply of finance between households and firms. And try to imagine a state without any tax income . It would only function by brute force, demanding forced labour instead of taxes and going back to feudalism. An economy consisting of only a state and a community economy will function at a very low level of wellbeingno resources for decent health care, public schools or scientific research, for example. Moreover, an economy without trade will punish those living in countries with limited natural resources and favour those who are lucky enough to be close to abundant fresh water, fertile soil and minerals. It may sound romantic, a world without markets, but to me it seems a nightmare in which the lucky and the powerful are likely to get what they want, either through the state run by elites due to a lack of a tax base, or by ignoring the state, which sounds equally undesirable. It will be a nasty world, just like a world without a state, as Thomas Hobbes argued almost four centuries ago. Just as nasty as a world without communities with their unpaid work in families, mutual caring and voluntary work in and between households, and their collective action around community resources. The challenge for a better economy is to abolish