CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics)
Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism). https://www.core-econ.org/ .oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this <https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism> https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism Thank you in advance for your interest and attention! __ Christian Stalberg Doctoral Student Anthropology & Social Change CIIS, San Francisco, CA "I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis "What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we're trying to get somebody else to do." - Alice Lynd "It's better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die." - Steve Biko "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but so did the divine right of kings." - Ursula K. Le Guin
Dear Christian, The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article. Best, Steve On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg < [email protected]> wrote:
Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism).
…oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism
Thank you in advance for your interest and attention!
__
Christian Stalberg
Doctoral Student
Anthropology & Social Change
CIIS, San Francisco, CA
*"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis*
*“What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd*
*“**It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko*
*“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin*
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
Kia ora tatou I wonder if it is possible for /any/ economics curriculum to be satisfactory. In Bruno Latour's view (see the quotes from/After Lockdown Metamorphosis/, 2021, below) 'economics' is an invention which has been and is still imposed with force. It obscures reality at best, and destroys it at worst. It was interesting to see in the philanthropy article which Christian provided the link to that 'philanthropy' now includes creating pro-capitalist propaganda. This reinforces Latour's point that a lot of work has gone and continues to go into creating the pseudo-reality of 'economics' and the Economy. It can be 'soft' work, like the creation of 'philanthropic' propaganda; or 'hard' work, like the murder of indigenous people and their supporters trying to prevent further 'economic' extraction of the life of their lands, and the minerals beneath them. It is still heretical these days to say that the Economy is not real, and we should focus on what is, and stop aiming to grow the Economy until it has devoured the Earth and all on it. It has been heretical for 50 years now, since the /Limits to Growth/ report was published in 1972, and a very small new party in a very small new-ish state (the New Zealand Values Party) put out an election manifesto with two key policies - Zero Economic Growth and Zero Population Growth. I don't know of any political party which has been so bold since - and you probably all know the connections between economic and population growth and how problematic both are these days. Also the connections with fossil fuel extraction and use. If I were a teenager today and had a choice between studying economics in a classroom or learning gardening in a community garden, I know what the smart choice would be. Christine p 59 “This time round, it’s not just a matter of improving, changing, greening or revolutionising the ‘economic’ system, but of /completely doing without the Economy./” p 60 “/Homo oeconomicus /has nothing native, natural or autochthonous about him, as we’ve long known. Strictly speaking, he comes from on high … /from the top down/, and not at all from ordinary practical experience, /from the ground up/, from the relationships that lifeforms maintain with other lifeforms.” p 60 “For the Economy to expand … as the bedrock of all possible life on earth, an enormous amount of infrastructure building is required to impose it as an obvious fact against the dogged resistance put up by the most common experience in reaction to such violent colonisation.” p 61 [Without this infrastructure] “no one would ever have invented ‘individuals’ capable of a selfishness drastic enough, constant enough, consistent enough to not ‘owe anyone anything’ and to see all others as ‘aliens’ and all life forms as ‘resources’. Beneath the evidence of a native, primal Economy lie three centuries of economisation….” [this preliminary embedding requires extreme violence] p 62 [In order not to stay in the economisation trap, the way out proposed by Duzan Kazik] “… consists in /never agreeing/ to say of any subject whatever that ‘it has an economic dimension’! Bowing to that dimension … always boils down to suggesting that, on the one hand, there is a profound, essential, vital reality – the economic situation – but that on the other hand, we could nonetheless, if we had the time, take ‘other dimensions’ into account – social, moral, political dimensions and even, why not, if there’s anything left over, an ‘ecological dimension’… Well, reasoning accordingly means giving the Economy a material reality it doesn’t have, and lending a hand to a power that trickles down from on high.” pp 74 - 75 “As soon as you describe a territory the right way round, you feel in your bones why the Economy could not be realistic or materialistic …. Embracing the Economy means interrupting the resumption of interactions by inventing beings who won’t have to account for themselves on the pretext that they’re autonomous individuals whose limits are protected by an exclusive right of ownership.” On 25/06/22 06:21, Steven J. Klees wrote:
Dear Christian,
The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article.
Best, Steve
On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg <[email protected]> wrote:
Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism).
…oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism <https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism>
Thank you in advance for your interest and attention!
__
Christian Stalberg
Doctoral Student
Anthropology & Social Change
CIIS, San Francisco, CA
/"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis/
/“What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd/
/“//It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko///
/“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin/
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
Dear all, I agree and wanted to point out that Escobar has described already in 95 economics as a cultural discourse imagining itself to be a science... but also that the 'problem' of population growth is usually focusing on poor people in the South (who use far far less resources and emit far far less CO2 than the global middle class) and of course on women (whose right to control their body is compromised) thus has racist and sexist elements. Best Aram On 25.06.22 22:37, Christine Dann wrote:
Kia ora tatou
I wonder if it is possible for /any/ economics curriculum to be satisfactory. In Bruno Latour's view (see the quotes from/After Lockdown Metamorphosis/, 2021, below) 'economics' is an invention which has been and is still imposed with force. It obscures reality at best, and destroys it at worst.
It was interesting to see in the philanthropy article which Christian provided the link to that 'philanthropy' now includes creating pro-capitalist propaganda. This reinforces Latour's point that a lot of work has gone and continues to go into creating the pseudo-reality of 'economics' and the Economy. It can be 'soft' work, like the creation of 'philanthropic' propaganda; or 'hard' work, like the murder of indigenous people and their supporters trying to prevent further 'economic' extraction of the life of their lands, and the minerals beneath them.
It is still heretical these days to say that the Economy is not real, and we should focus on what is, and stop aiming to grow the Economy until it has devoured the Earth and all on it. It has been heretical for 50 years now, since the /Limits to Growth/ report was published in 1972, and a very small new party in a very small new-ish state (the New Zealand Values Party) put out an election manifesto with two key policies - Zero Economic Growth and Zero Population Growth. I don't know of any political party which has been so bold since - and you probably all know the connections between economic and population growth and how problematic both are these days. Also the connections with fossil fuel extraction and use.
If I were a teenager today and had a choice between studying economics in a classroom or learning gardening in a community garden, I know what the smart choice would be.
Christine
p 59 “This time round, it’s not just a matter of improving, changing, greening or revolutionising the ‘economic’ system, but of /completely doing without the Economy./”
p 60 “/Homo oeconomicus /has nothing native, natural or autochthonous about him, as we’ve long known. Strictly speaking, he comes from on high … /from the top down/, and not at all from ordinary practical experience, /from the ground up/, from the relationships that lifeforms maintain with other lifeforms.”
p 60 “For the Economy to expand … as the bedrock of all possible life on earth, an enormous amount of infrastructure building is required to impose it as an obvious fact against the dogged resistance put up by the most common experience in reaction to such violent colonisation.”
p 61 [Without this infrastructure] “no one would ever have invented ‘individuals’ capable of a selfishness drastic enough, constant enough, consistent enough to not ‘owe anyone anything’ and to see all others as ‘aliens’ and all life forms as ‘resources’. Beneath the evidence of a native, primal Economy lie three centuries of economisation….” [this preliminary embedding requires extreme violence]
p 62 [In order not to stay in the economisation trap, the way out proposed by Duzan Kazik] “… consists in /never agreeing/ to say of any subject whatever that ‘it has an economic dimension’! Bowing to that dimension … always boils down to suggesting that, on the one hand, there is a profound, essential, vital reality – the economic situation – but that on the other hand, we could nonetheless, if we had the time, take ‘other dimensions’ into account – social, moral, political dimensions and even, why not, if there’s anything left over, an ‘ecological dimension’… Well, reasoning accordingly means giving the Economy a material reality it doesn’t have, and lending a hand to a power that trickles down from on high.”
pp 74 - 75 “As soon as you describe a territory the right way round, you feel in your bones why the Economy could not be realistic or materialistic …. Embracing the Economy means interrupting the resumption of interactions by inventing beings who won’t have to account for themselves on the pretext that they’re autonomous individuals whose limits are protected by an exclusive right of ownership.”
On 25/06/22 06:21, Steven J. Klees wrote:
Dear Christian,
The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article.
Best, Steve
On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg <[email protected]> wrote:
Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism).
…oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism <https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism>
Thank you in advance for your interest and attention!
__
Christian Stalberg
Doctoral Student
Anthropology & Social Change
CIIS, San Francisco, CA
/"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis/
/“What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd/
/“//It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko///
/“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin/
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
-- Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai Chair of Development and Postcolonial Studies Executive Director Global Partnership Network Faculty of Social Sciences University of Kassel Nora-Platiel-Str. 1 34109 Kassel Germany ++49 561 804-3023 [email protected] https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/en/fachgruppen/politikwissenschaft/department... https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/global-partnership-network/home/ New video: Post-Development - Questioning the whole paradigm.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsrK-XuSZZQ Open access article: Neocolonialism in the global economy of the 21st century: an overview, in: Momentum Quarterly 9 (3), 128-140. Open access:https://www.momentum-quarterly.org/ojs2/index.php/momentum/article/view/3478 New edited volume: Beyond the master's tools? Decolonizing knowledge orders, research methods and teaching. London: Rowman & Littlefield (with Franziska Müller and Daniel Bendix) https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786613592/Beyond-the-Master's-Tools-Decolonizing-Knowledge-Orders-Research-Methods-and-Teaching New edited volume: The Development Dictionary @25: Post-Development and its consequences. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Development-Dictionary-25-Post-Development-and... Open access book: Development Discourse and Global History. From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Development-Discourse-and-Global-History-From-colo... Open access article: Post-Development: Premature Burials and Haunting Ghosts. In: Development and Change 46 (4), 833-854. open access:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12177/full Open access article: Post-development 25 years after The Development Dictionary, Third World Quarterly, 38:12, 2547-2558,https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1383853
This is interesting, friends. Though, does it not depend on what definition of 'economics' we are accepting as legitimate? Its original meaning (from 'oikos' ... and therefore also linked to ecology) is 'management of the home' ... so if ecology is put at the base ('understanding the home') and we relate to the Earth our home in ways that reflect a deep understanding, is that not something humans have been doing forever? So, do we accept the modernist westernised version of 'economics', or the much broader, deeper meaning of it ... do we discard it totally because it is badly corrupted/co-opted, or do we rescue it? This relates to one of my favourite pre-occupations, of understanding original meanings of words, and seeing if there is subversive/revolutionary potential in rescuing them, or are they so inextricably embedded in the system we are fighting against, that its best to abandon them and find alternatives? An eminently 'pedagogical' quest, I suppose. And in that spirit, note that the term 'pedagogy', at least according to my laptop's inbuilt dictionary, comes from a v. dubious origin: "lateMiddle English: viaLatinfromGreekpaidagōgos, denoting a slavewhoaccompanieda child to school (frompais,paid-‘boy’+agōgos‘guide’)." I found this out to my utter chagrin /after /having suggested PeDAGoG (Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group) as the acronym for this network! So in this case, its not about rescuing the original meaning, but giving it a new, v. different, one! But sorry, let this observation not distract from the main topic of conversation here ... whether economics should or should not be in curricula, and it is should, waht should be its contours/substance (and /not /going further here into whether formal curricula should exist in the first place :):) ashish Ashish Kothari New, for post-COVID dignified livelihoods in India! Vikalp Sutra <https://sutra.vikalpsangam.org/> FREE DOWNLOAD! Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary <https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/pluriverse> Ashish Kothari Kalpavriksh Apt 5 Shree Datta Krupa 908 Deccan Gymkhana Pune 411004, India Tel: 91-20-25654239; 91-20-25675450 Kalpavriksh <https://kalpavriksh.org/> Vikalp Sangam <http://vikalpsangam.org/> Radical Ecological Democracy <http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/> Global Tapestry of Alternatives <http://www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org/> https://ashishkothari51.blogspot.com Twitter <https://twitter.com/chikikothari> LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishkothari1961> Instagram <https://www.instagram.com/ashishkotharivikalp/> Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/ashish.kothari.1297> On 26/06/22 2:08 pm, Aram Ziai wrote:
Dear all,
I agree and wanted to point out that Escobar has described already in 95 economics as a cultural discourse imagining itself to be a science... but also that the 'problem' of population growth is usually focusing on poor people in the South (who use far far less resources and emit far far less CO2 than the global middle class) and of course on women (whose right to control their body is compromised) thus has racist and sexist elements.
Best
Aram
On 25.06.22 22:37, Christine Dann wrote:
Kia ora tatou
I wonder if it is possible for /any/ economics curriculum to be satisfactory. In Bruno Latour's view (see the quotes from/After Lockdown Metamorphosis/, 2021, below) 'economics' is an invention which has been and is still imposed with force. It obscures reality at best, and destroys it at worst.
It was interesting to see in the philanthropy article which Christian provided the link to that 'philanthropy' now includes creating pro-capitalist propaganda. This reinforces Latour's point that a lot of work has gone and continues to go into creating the pseudo-reality of 'economics' and the Economy. It can be 'soft' work, like the creation of 'philanthropic' propaganda; or 'hard' work, like the murder of indigenous people and their supporters trying to prevent further 'economic' extraction of the life of their lands, and the minerals beneath them.
It is still heretical these days to say that the Economy is not real, and we should focus on what is, and stop aiming to grow the Economy until it has devoured the Earth and all on it. It has been heretical for 50 years now, since the /Limits to Growth/ report was published in 1972, and a very small new party in a very small new-ish state (the New Zealand Values Party) put out an election manifesto with two key policies - Zero Economic Growth and Zero Population Growth. I don't know of any political party which has been so bold since - and you probably all know the connections between economic and population growth and how problematic both are these days. Also the connections with fossil fuel extraction and use.
If I were a teenager today and had a choice between studying economics in a classroom or learning gardening in a community garden, I know what the smart choice would be.
Christine
p 59 “This time round, it’s not just a matter of improving, changing, greening or revolutionising the ‘economic’ system, but of /completely doing without the Economy./”
p 60 “/Homo oeconomicus /has nothing native, natural or autochthonous about him, as we’ve long known. Strictly speaking, he comes from on high … /from the top down/, and not at all from ordinary practical experience, /from the ground up/, from the relationships that lifeforms maintain with other lifeforms.”
p 60 “For the Economy to expand … as the bedrock of all possible life on earth, an enormous amount of infrastructure building is required to impose it as an obvious fact against the dogged resistance put up by the most common experience in reaction to such violent colonisation.”
p 61 [Without this infrastructure] “no one would ever have invented ‘individuals’ capable of a selfishness drastic enough, constant enough, consistent enough to not ‘owe anyone anything’ and to see all others as ‘aliens’ and all life forms as ‘resources’. Beneath the evidence of a native, primal Economy lie three centuries of economisation….” [this preliminary embedding requires extreme violence]
p 62 [In order not to stay in the economisation trap, the way out proposed by Duzan Kazik] “… consists in /never agreeing/ to say of any subject whatever that ‘it has an economic dimension’! Bowing to that dimension … always boils down to suggesting that, on the one hand, there is a profound, essential, vital reality – the economic situation – but that on the other hand, we could nonetheless, if we had the time, take ‘other dimensions’ into account – social, moral, political dimensions and even, why not, if there’s anything left over, an ‘ecological dimension’… Well, reasoning accordingly means giving the Economy a material reality it doesn’t have, and lending a hand to a power that trickles down from on high.”
pp 74 - 75 “As soon as you describe a territory the right way round, you feel in your bones why the Economy could not be realistic or materialistic …. Embracing the Economy means interrupting the resumption of interactions by inventing beings who won’t have to account for themselves on the pretext that they’re autonomous individuals whose limits are protected by an exclusive right of ownership.”
On 25/06/22 06:21, Steven J. Klees wrote:
Dear Christian,
The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article.
Best, Steve
On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg <[email protected]> wrote:
Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism).
…oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism <https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism>
Thank you in advance for your interest and attention!
__
Christian Stalberg
Doctoral Student
Anthropology & Social Change
CIIS, San Francisco, CA
/"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis/
/“What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd/
/“//It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko///
/“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin/
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog -- Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai Chair of Development and Postcolonial Studies Executive Director Global Partnership Network Faculty of Social Sciences University of Kassel Nora-Platiel-Str. 1 34109 Kassel Germany ++49 561 804-3023 [email protected] https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/en/fachgruppen/politikwissenschaft/department... https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/global-partnership-network/home/
New video: Post-Development - Questioning the whole paradigm.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsrK-XuSZZQ
Open access article: Neocolonialism in the global economy of the 21st century: an overview, in: Momentum Quarterly 9 (3), 128-140. Open access:https://www.momentum-quarterly.org/ojs2/index.php/momentum/article/view/3478
New edited volume: Beyond the master's tools? Decolonizing knowledge orders, research methods and teaching. London: Rowman & Littlefield (with Franziska Müller and Daniel Bendix) https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786613592/Beyond-the-Master's-Tools-Decolonizing-Knowledge-Orders-Research-Methods-and-Teaching
New edited volume: The Development Dictionary @25: Post-Development and its consequences. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Development-Dictionary-25-Post-Development-and...
Open access book: Development Discourse and Global History. From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Development-Discourse-and-Global-History-From-colo...
Open access article: Post-Development: Premature Burials and Haunting Ghosts. In: Development and Change 46 (4), 833-854. open access:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12177/full
Open access article: Post-development 25 years after The Development Dictionary, Third World Quarterly, 38:12, 2547-2558,https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1383853
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
As someone schooled in neoclassical economics, I find both its neoliberal and liberal variants bankrupt. I find alternative approaches to economics most significant in what is being done in economics in practice by groups like GTA and others, as I have said in this blog: https://evonomics.com/klees-neoclassical-economics-failed-what-comes-next/ There have been interesting attempts to break free of the neoclassical straightjacket in approaches like ecological economics and feminist economics, but too often they don't really break free. However, sometimes under the label "political economy" you have true alternatives that start with the bankruptcy of capitalism ("political economy" is also used by the right). The World Economics Association takes a "heterodox" stance (in opposition to "orthodox" economics which is another term for neoclassical) and publishes a list of alternative texts, some of which offer more sensible approaches to economics: https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/textbook-commentaries/alternative-... Best, Steve On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 6:38 AM Ashish Kothari <[email protected]> wrote:
This is interesting, friends. Though, does it not depend on what definition of 'economics' we are accepting as legitimate? Its original meaning (from 'oikos' ... and therefore also linked to ecology) is 'management of the home' ... so if ecology is put at the base ('understanding the home') and we relate to the Earth our home in ways that reflect a deep understanding, is that not something humans have been doing forever?
So, do we accept the modernist westernised version of 'economics', or the much broader, deeper meaning of it ... do we discard it totally because it is badly corrupted/co-opted, or do we rescue it? This relates to one of my favourite pre-occupations, of understanding original meanings of words, and seeing if there is subversive/revolutionary potential in rescuing them, or are they so inextricably embedded in the system we are fighting against, that its best to abandon them and find alternatives? An eminently 'pedagogical' quest, I suppose.
And in that spirit, note that the term 'pedagogy', at least according to my laptop's inbuilt dictionary, comes from a v. dubious origin: "late Middle English: via Latin from Greek paidagōgos, denoting a slave who accompanied a child to school (from pais, paid- ‘boy’ + agōgos ‘guide’)." I found this out to my utter chagrin *after *having suggested PeDAGoG (Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group) as the acronym for this network! So in this case, its not about rescuing the original meaning, but giving it a new, v. different, one! But sorry, let this observation not distract from the main topic of conversation here ... whether economics should or should not be in curricula, and it is should, waht should be its contours/substance (and *not *going further here into whether formal curricula should exist in the first place :):)
ashish
New, for post-COVID dignified livelihoods in India! Vikalp Sutra <https://sutra.vikalpsangam.org/>
FREE DOWNLOAD! Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary <https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/pluriverse>
Ashish Kothari
Kalpavriksh
Apt 5 Shree Datta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana
Pune 411004, India
Tel: 91-20-25654239; 91-20-25675450
Kalpavriksh <https://kalpavriksh.org/>
Vikalp Sangam <http://vikalpsangam.org/>
Radical Ecological Democracy <http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/>
Global Tapestry of Alternatives <http://www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org/>
https://ashishkothari51.blogspot.com
Twitter <https://twitter.com/chikikothari> LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishkothari1961> Instagram <https://www.instagram.com/ashishkotharivikalp/> Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/ashish.kothari.1297>
On 26/06/22 2:08 pm, Aram Ziai wrote:
Dear all,
I agree and wanted to point out that Escobar has described already in 95 economics as a cultural discourse imagining itself to be a science... but also that the 'problem' of population growth is usually focusing on poor people in the South (who use far far less resources and emit far far less CO2 than the global middle class) and of course on women (whose right to control their body is compromised) thus has racist and sexist elements.
Best
Aram
On 25.06.22 22:37, Christine Dann wrote:
Kia ora tatou
I wonder if it is possible for *any* economics curriculum to be satisfactory. In Bruno Latour's view (see the quotes from* After Lockdown Metamorphosis*, 2021, below) 'economics' is an invention which has been and is still imposed with force. It obscures reality at best, and destroys it at worst.
It was interesting to see in the philanthropy article which Christian provided the link to that 'philanthropy' now includes creating pro-capitalist propaganda. This reinforces Latour's point that a lot of work has gone and continues to go into creating the pseudo-reality of 'economics' and the Economy. It can be 'soft' work, like the creation of 'philanthropic' propaganda; or 'hard' work, like the murder of indigenous people and their supporters trying to prevent further 'economic' extraction of the life of their lands, and the minerals beneath them.
It is still heretical these days to say that the Economy is not real, and we should focus on what is, and stop aiming to grow the Economy until it has devoured the Earth and all on it. It has been heretical for 50 years now, since the *Limits to Growth* report was published in 1972, and a very small new party in a very small new-ish state (the New Zealand Values Party) put out an election manifesto with two key policies - Zero Economic Growth and Zero Population Growth. I don't know of any political party which has been so bold since - and you probably all know the connections between economic and population growth and how problematic both are these days. Also the connections with fossil fuel extraction and use.
If I were a teenager today and had a choice between studying economics in a classroom or learning gardening in a community garden, I know what the smart choice would be.
Christine
p 59 “This time round, it’s not just a matter of improving, changing, greening or revolutionising the ‘economic’ system, but of *completely doing without the Economy.*”
p 60 “*Homo oeconomicus *has nothing native, natural or autochthonous about him, as we’ve long known. Strictly speaking, he comes from on high … *from the top down*, and not at all from ordinary practical experience, *from the ground up*, from the relationships that lifeforms maintain with other lifeforms.”
p 60 “For the Economy to expand … as the bedrock of all possible life on earth, an enormous amount of infrastructure building is required to impose it as an obvious fact against the dogged resistance put up by the most common experience in reaction to such violent colonisation.”
p 61 [Without this infrastructure] “no one would ever have invented ‘individuals’ capable of a selfishness drastic enough, constant enough, consistent enough to not ‘owe anyone anything’ and to see all others as ‘aliens’ and all life forms as ‘resources’. Beneath the evidence of a native, primal Economy lie three centuries of economisation….” [this preliminary embedding requires extreme violence]
p 62 [In order not to stay in the economisation trap, the way out proposed by Duzan Kazik] “… consists in *never agreeing* to say of any subject whatever that ‘it has an economic dimension’! Bowing to that dimension … always boils down to suggesting that, on the one hand, there is a profound, essential, vital reality – the economic situation – but that on the other hand, we could nonetheless, if we had the time, take ‘other dimensions’ into account – social, moral, political dimensions and even, why not, if there’s anything left over, an ‘ecological dimension’… Well, reasoning accordingly means giving the Economy a material reality it doesn’t have, and lending a hand to a power that trickles down from on high.”
pp 74 - 75 “As soon as you describe a territory the right way round, you feel in your bones why the Economy could not be realistic or materialistic …. Embracing the Economy means interrupting the resumption of interactions by inventing beings who won’t have to account for themselves on the pretext that they’re autonomous individuals whose limits are protected by an exclusive right of ownership.”
On 25/06/22 06:21, Steven J. Klees wrote:
Dear Christian,
The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article.
Best, Steve
On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg < [email protected]> wrote:
Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism).
…oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism
Thank you in advance for your interest and attention!
__
Christian Stalberg
Doctoral Student
Anthropology & Social Change
CIIS, San Francisco, CA
*"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis*
*“What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd*
*“**It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko*
*“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin*
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-- Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai Chair of Development and Postcolonial Studies Executive Director Global Partnership Network Faculty of Social Sciences University of Kassel Nora-Platiel-Str. 1 34109 Kassel Germany ++49 561 [email protected]https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/en/fachgruppen/politikwissenschaft/department...
New video: Post-Development - Questioning the whole paradigm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsrK-XuSZZQ
Open access article: Neocolonialism in the global economy of the 21st century: an overview, in: Momentum Quarterly 9 (3), 128-140. Open access: https://www.momentum-quarterly.org/ojs2/index.php/momentum/article/view/3478
New edited volume: Beyond the master's tools? Decolonizing knowledge orders, research methods and teaching. London: Rowman & Littlefield (with Franziska Müller and Daniel Bendix)https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786613592/Beyond-the-Master's-Tools-Decolonizing-Knowledge-Orders-Research-Methods-and-Teaching
New edited volume: The Development Dictionary @25: Post-Development and its consequences. London: Routledge.https://www.routledge.com/The-Development-Dictionary-25-Post-Development-and...
Open access book: Development Discourse and Global History. From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals. London: Routledge.https://www.routledge.com/Development-Discourse-and-Global-History-From-colo...
Open access article: Post-Development: Premature Burials and Haunting Ghosts. In: Development and Change 46 (4), 833-854. open access: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12177/full
Open access article: Post-development 25 years after The Development Dictionary, Third World Quarterly, 38:12, 2547-2558, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1383853
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Friends, I am pleased as punch with this discussion. To be reductionist for a moment, it seems like it comes down to the age old debate of “reform vs revolution”. Steven, one of the comments to your cited blog entry suggested the writings of Henry George. Also, this book was suggested, which sounds tempting: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Corruption_of_Economics.html?id=5vj... <https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Corruption_of_Economics.html?id=5vjs_O6cRMAC&source=kp_book_description> &source=kp_book_description I tend to wonder whether or not existing systems will be capable of pivoting in the time required for ‘reform’ given accelerating climate chaos impacts and neoliberal capitalist accumulative savagery. The revolution may be forced upon us simply in order to be able to eat. What has this got to do with pedagogy? A lot I’m afraid. If we assume centralized supply chains are toast we have a very different looking world then at present and we will have to teach to it accordingly, no? Thank you Steven, Christine, Aram, Ashish & Michel. Keep going all! __ Christian Stalberg Doctoral Student Anthropology & Social Change CIIS, San Francisco, CA "I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis “What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd “It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin From: GTA-PeDAGoG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Steven J. Klees Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2022 7:16 AM To: PeDAGoG: Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PeDAGoG] CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics) As someone schooled in neoclassical economics, I find both its neoliberal and liberal variants bankrupt. I find alternative approaches to economics most significant in what is being done in economics in practice by groups like GTA and others, as I have said in this blog: https://evonomics.com/klees-neoclassical-economics-failed-what-comes-next/ There have been interesting attempts to break free of the neoclassical straightjacket in approaches like ecological economics and feminist economics, but too often they don't really break free. However, sometimes under the label "political economy" you have true alternatives that start with the bankruptcy of capitalism ("political economy" is also used by the right). The World Economics Association takes a "heterodox" stance (in opposition to "orthodox" economics which is another term for neoclassical) and publishes a list of alternative texts, some of which offer more sensible approaches to economics: https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/textbook-commentaries/alternative-... Best, Steve On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 6:38 AM Ashish Kothari <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: This is interesting, friends. Though, does it not depend on what definition of 'economics' we are accepting as legitimate? Its original meaning (from 'oikos' ... and therefore also linked to ecology) is 'management of the home' ... so if ecology is put at the base ('understanding the home') and we relate to the Earth our home in ways that reflect a deep understanding, is that not something humans have been doing forever? So, do we accept the modernist westernised version of 'economics', or the much broader, deeper meaning of it ... do we discard it totally because it is badly corrupted/co-opted, or do we rescue it? This relates to one of my favourite pre-occupations, of understanding original meanings of words, and seeing if there is subversive/revolutionary potential in rescuing them, or are they so inextricably embedded in the system we are fighting against, that its best to abandon them and find alternatives? An eminently 'pedagogical' quest, I suppose. And in that spirit, note that the term 'pedagogy', at least according to my laptop's inbuilt dictionary, comes from a v. dubious origin: "late Middle English: via Latin from Greek paidagōgos, denoting a slave who accompanied a child to school (from pais, paid- ‘boy’ + agōgos ‘guide’)." I found this out to my utter chagrin after having suggested PeDAGoG (Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group) as the acronym for this network! So in this case, its not about rescuing the original meaning, but giving it a new, v. different, one! But sorry, let this observation not distract from the main topic of conversation here ... whether economics should or should not be in curricula, and it is should, waht should be its contours/substance (and not going further here into whether formal curricula should exist in the first place :):) ashish New, for post-COVID dignified livelihoods in India! Vikalp Sutra <https://sutra.vikalpsangam.org/> FREE DOWNLOAD! Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary <https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/pluriverse> Ashish Kothari Kalpavriksh Apt 5 Shree Datta Krupa 908 Deccan Gymkhana Pune 411004, India Tel: 91-20-25654239; 91-20-25675450 Kalpavriksh <https://kalpavriksh.org/> Vikalp Sangam <http://vikalpsangam.org/> Radical Ecological Democracy <http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/> Global Tapestry of Alternatives <http://www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org/> https://ashishkothari51.blogspot.com Twitter <https://twitter.com/chikikothari> LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishkothari1961> Instagram <https://www.instagram.com/ashishkotharivikalp/> Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/ashish.kothari.1297> On 26/06/22 2:08 pm, Aram Ziai wrote: Dear all, I agree and wanted to point out that Escobar has described already in 95 economics as a cultural discourse imagining itself to be a science... but also that the 'problem' of population growth is usually focusing on poor people in the South (who use far far less resources and emit far far less CO2 than the global middle class) and of course on women (whose right to control their body is compromised) thus has racist and sexist elements. Best Aram On 25.06.22 22:37, Christine Dann wrote: Kia ora tatou I wonder if it is possible for any economics curriculum to be satisfactory. In Bruno Latour's view (see the quotes from After Lockdown Metamorphosis, 2021, below) 'economics' is an invention which has been and is still imposed with force. It obscures reality at best, and destroys it at worst. It was interesting to see in the philanthropy article which Christian provided the link to that 'philanthropy' now includes creating pro-capitalist propaganda. This reinforces Latour's point that a lot of work has gone and continues to go into creating the pseudo-reality of 'economics' and the Economy. It can be 'soft' work, like the creation of 'philanthropic' propaganda; or 'hard' work, like the murder of indigenous people and their supporters trying to prevent further 'economic' extraction of the life of their lands, and the minerals beneath them. It is still heretical these days to say that the Economy is not real, and we should focus on what is, and stop aiming to grow the Economy until it has devoured the Earth and all on it. It has been heretical for 50 years now, since the Limits to Growth report was published in 1972, and a very small new party in a very small new-ish state (the New Zealand Values Party) put out an election manifesto with two key policies - Zero Economic Growth and Zero Population Growth. I don't know of any political party which has been so bold since - and you probably all know the connections between economic and population growth and how problematic both are these days. Also the connections with fossil fuel extraction and use. If I were a teenager today and had a choice between studying economics in a classroom or learning gardening in a community garden, I know what the smart choice would be. Christine p 59 “This time round, it’s not just a matter of improving, changing, greening or revolutionising the ‘economic’ system, but of completely doing without the Economy.” p 60 “Homo oeconomicus has nothing native, natural or autochthonous about him, as we’ve long known. Strictly speaking, he comes from on high … from the top down, and not at all from ordinary practical experience, from the ground up, from the relationships that lifeforms maintain with other lifeforms.” p 60 “For the Economy to expand … as the bedrock of all possible life on earth, an enormous amount of infrastructure building is required to impose it as an obvious fact against the dogged resistance put up by the most common experience in reaction to such violent colonisation.” p 61 [Without this infrastructure] “no one would ever have invented ‘individuals’ capable of a selfishness drastic enough, constant enough, consistent enough to not ‘owe anyone anything’ and to see all others as ‘aliens’ and all life forms as ‘resources’. Beneath the evidence of a native, primal Economy lie three centuries of economisation….” [this preliminary embedding requires extreme violence] p 62 [In order not to stay in the economisation trap, the way out proposed by Duzan Kazik] “… consists in never agreeing to say of any subject whatever that ‘it has an economic dimension’! Bowing to that dimension … always boils down to suggesting that, on the one hand, there is a profound, essential, vital reality – the economic situation – but that on the other hand, we could nonetheless, if we had the time, take ‘other dimensions’ into account – social, moral, political dimensions and even, why not, if there’s anything left over, an ‘ecological dimension’… Well, reasoning accordingly means giving the Economy a material reality it doesn’t have, and lending a hand to a power that trickles down from on high.” pp 74 - 75 “As soon as you describe a territory the right way round, you feel in your bones why the Economy could not be realistic or materialistic …. Embracing the Economy means interrupting the resumption of interactions by inventing beings who won’t have to account for themselves on the pretext that they’re autonomous individuals whose limits are protected by an exclusive right of ownership.” On 25/06/22 06:21, Steven J. Klees wrote: Dear Christian, The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article. Best, Steve On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism). https://www.core-econ.org/ …oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism Thank you in advance for your interest and attention! __ Christian Stalberg Doctoral Student Anthropology & Social Change CIIS, San Francisco, CA "I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis “What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd “It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin _______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog _______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog _______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog -- Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai Chair of Development and Postcolonial Studies Executive Director Global Partnership Network Faculty of Social Sciences University of Kassel Nora-Platiel-Str. 1 34109 Kassel Germany ++49 561 804-3023 [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/en/fachgruppen/politikwissenschaft/department... https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/global-partnership-network/home/ New video: Post-Development - Questioning the whole paradigm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsrK-XuSZZQ Open access article: Neocolonialism in the global economy of the 21st century: an overview, in: Momentum Quarterly 9 (3), 128-140. Open access: https://www.momentum-quarterly.org/ojs2/index.php/momentum/article/view/3478 New edited volume: Beyond the master's tools? Decolonizing knowledge orders, research methods and teaching. London: Rowman & Littlefield (with Franziska Müller and Daniel Bendix) https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786613592/Beyond-the-Master's-Tools-Decolonizing-Knowledge-Orders-Research-Methods-and-Teaching New edited volume: The Development Dictionary @25: Post-Development and its consequences. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Development-Dictionary-25-Post-Development-and... Open access book: Development Discourse and Global History. From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Development-Discourse-and-Global-History-From-colo... Open access article: Post-Development: Premature Burials and Haunting Ghosts. In: Development and Change 46 (4), 833-854. open access: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12177/full Open access article: Post-development 25 years after The Development Dictionary, Third World Quarterly, 38:12, 2547-2558, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1383853 _______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog _______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
Hello everyone, Many apologies, i will not enter the discussion about economics as such because i have enough material online for anyone who wants to have a look whether we can have economic knowledge that does not harm humans and nature. Two notes about the greek words, though, just to make sure that if you want to discuss etymologies, you do it properly: paidagogos. Pais=child, can be a girl or boy. In modern Greek we also have "to paidi" which is gender neutral. Agogos= from ago verb, means leading, guiding, doing by action. Paidagogos=also can be a woman or a man, means the person who gives agogi (culture and good manners) to children. The emphasis both in ancient and modern Greek is on cultural and social aspects of education, not just giving information in terms of formal knowledge. We use all those words today and paidagogiki (the art-science of paidagogos) is not just teaching things to be certified in a degree but more than that. Oikonomia - economy. Nothing to do with the english ab-use of the word. Oikos=house in its extended form, i.e. not only the residence but the whole estate for a household. It also means family, in its extended form. Nomi-a, from verb nemo=sharing, using something. Nomos=law, i.e. rules about sharing and using resources. Oikonomia=sharing and using resources within oikos, creating rules about this sharing. I have written about this already, you may find the writings online. Have a nice day, Irene Στις Κυρ 26 Ιουν 2022 στις 3:26 μ.μ., ο/η Steven J. Klees <[email protected]> έγραψε:
As someone schooled in neoclassical economics, I find both its neoliberal and liberal variants bankrupt. I find alternative approaches to economics most significant in what is being done in economics in practice by groups like GTA and others, as I have said in this blog:
https://evonomics.com/klees-neoclassical-economics-failed-what-comes-next/
There have been interesting attempts to break free of the neoclassical straightjacket in approaches like ecological economics and feminist economics, but too often they don't really break free. However, sometimes under the label "political economy" you have true alternatives that start with the bankruptcy of capitalism ("political economy" is also used by the right). The World Economics Association takes a "heterodox" stance (in opposition to "orthodox" economics which is another term for neoclassical) and publishes a list of alternative texts, some of which offer more sensible approaches to economics:
https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/textbook-commentaries/alternative-...
Best, Steve
On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 6:38 AM Ashish Kothari <[email protected]> wrote:
This is interesting, friends. Though, does it not depend on what definition of 'economics' we are accepting as legitimate? Its original meaning (from 'oikos' ... and therefore also linked to ecology) is 'management of the home' ... so if ecology is put at the base ('understanding the home') and we relate to the Earth our home in ways that reflect a deep understanding, is that not something humans have been doing forever?
So, do we accept the modernist westernised version of 'economics', or the much broader, deeper meaning of it ... do we discard it totally because it is badly corrupted/co-opted, or do we rescue it? This relates to one of my favourite pre-occupations, of understanding original meanings of words, and seeing if there is subversive/revolutionary potential in rescuing them, or are they so inextricably embedded in the system we are fighting against, that its best to abandon them and find alternatives? An eminently 'pedagogical' quest, I suppose.
And in that spirit, note that the term 'pedagogy', at least according to my laptop's inbuilt dictionary, comes from a v. dubious origin: "late Middle English: via Latin from Greek paidagōgos, denoting a slave who accompanied a child to school (from pais, paid- ‘boy’ + agōgos ‘guide’)." I found this out to my utter chagrin *after *having suggested PeDAGoG (Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group) as the acronym for this network! So in this case, its not about rescuing the original meaning, but giving it a new, v. different, one! But sorry, let this observation not distract from the main topic of conversation here ... whether economics should or should not be in curricula, and it is should, waht should be its contours/substance (and *not *going further here into whether formal curricula should exist in the first place :):)
ashish
New, for post-COVID dignified livelihoods in India! Vikalp Sutra <https://sutra.vikalpsangam.org/>
FREE DOWNLOAD! Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary <https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/pluriverse>
Ashish Kothari
Kalpavriksh
Apt 5 Shree Datta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana
Pune 411004, India
Tel: 91-20-25654239; 91-20-25675450
Kalpavriksh <https://kalpavriksh.org/>
Vikalp Sangam <http://vikalpsangam.org/>
Radical Ecological Democracy <http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/>
Global Tapestry of Alternatives <http://www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org/>
https://ashishkothari51.blogspot.com
Twitter <https://twitter.com/chikikothari> LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishkothari1961> Instagram <https://www.instagram.com/ashishkotharivikalp/> Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/ashish.kothari.1297>
On 26/06/22 2:08 pm, Aram Ziai wrote:
Dear all,
I agree and wanted to point out that Escobar has described already in 95 economics as a cultural discourse imagining itself to be a science... but also that the 'problem' of population growth is usually focusing on poor people in the South (who use far far less resources and emit far far less CO2 than the global middle class) and of course on women (whose right to control their body is compromised) thus has racist and sexist elements.
Best
Aram
On 25.06.22 22:37, Christine Dann wrote:
Kia ora tatou
I wonder if it is possible for *any* economics curriculum to be satisfactory. In Bruno Latour's view (see the quotes from* After Lockdown Metamorphosis*, 2021, below) 'economics' is an invention which has been and is still imposed with force. It obscures reality at best, and destroys it at worst.
It was interesting to see in the philanthropy article which Christian provided the link to that 'philanthropy' now includes creating pro-capitalist propaganda. This reinforces Latour's point that a lot of work has gone and continues to go into creating the pseudo-reality of 'economics' and the Economy. It can be 'soft' work, like the creation of 'philanthropic' propaganda; or 'hard' work, like the murder of indigenous people and their supporters trying to prevent further 'economic' extraction of the life of their lands, and the minerals beneath them.
It is still heretical these days to say that the Economy is not real, and we should focus on what is, and stop aiming to grow the Economy until it has devoured the Earth and all on it. It has been heretical for 50 years now, since the *Limits to Growth* report was published in 1972, and a very small new party in a very small new-ish state (the New Zealand Values Party) put out an election manifesto with two key policies - Zero Economic Growth and Zero Population Growth. I don't know of any political party which has been so bold since - and you probably all know the connections between economic and population growth and how problematic both are these days. Also the connections with fossil fuel extraction and use.
If I were a teenager today and had a choice between studying economics in a classroom or learning gardening in a community garden, I know what the smart choice would be.
Christine
p 59 “This time round, it’s not just a matter of improving, changing, greening or revolutionising the ‘economic’ system, but of *completely doing without the Economy.*”
p 60 “*Homo oeconomicus *has nothing native, natural or autochthonous about him, as we’ve long known. Strictly speaking, he comes from on high … *from the top down*, and not at all from ordinary practical experience, *from the ground up*, from the relationships that lifeforms maintain with other lifeforms.”
p 60 “For the Economy to expand … as the bedrock of all possible life on earth, an enormous amount of infrastructure building is required to impose it as an obvious fact against the dogged resistance put up by the most common experience in reaction to such violent colonisation.”
p 61 [Without this infrastructure] “no one would ever have invented ‘individuals’ capable of a selfishness drastic enough, constant enough, consistent enough to not ‘owe anyone anything’ and to see all others as ‘aliens’ and all life forms as ‘resources’. Beneath the evidence of a native, primal Economy lie three centuries of economisation….” [this preliminary embedding requires extreme violence]
p 62 [In order not to stay in the economisation trap, the way out proposed by Duzan Kazik] “… consists in *never agreeing* to say of any subject whatever that ‘it has an economic dimension’! Bowing to that dimension … always boils down to suggesting that, on the one hand, there is a profound, essential, vital reality – the economic situation – but that on the other hand, we could nonetheless, if we had the time, take ‘other dimensions’ into account – social, moral, political dimensions and even, why not, if there’s anything left over, an ‘ecological dimension’… Well, reasoning accordingly means giving the Economy a material reality it doesn’t have, and lending a hand to a power that trickles down from on high.”
pp 74 - 75 “As soon as you describe a territory the right way round, you feel in your bones why the Economy could not be realistic or materialistic …. Embracing the Economy means interrupting the resumption of interactions by inventing beings who won’t have to account for themselves on the pretext that they’re autonomous individuals whose limits are protected by an exclusive right of ownership.”
On 25/06/22 06:21, Steven J. Klees wrote:
Dear Christian,
The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article.
Best, Steve
On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg < [email protected]> wrote:
Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism).
…oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism
Thank you in advance for your interest and attention!
__
Christian Stalberg
Doctoral Student
Anthropology & Social Change
CIIS, San Francisco, CA
*"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis*
*“What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd*
*“**It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko*
*“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin*
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing [email protected]http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing [email protected]http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
-- Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai Chair of Development and Postcolonial Studies Executive Director Global Partnership Network Faculty of Social Sciences University of Kassel Nora-Platiel-Str. 1 34109 Kassel Germany ++49 561 [email protected]https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/en/fachgruppen/politikwissenschaft/department...
New video: Post-Development - Questioning the whole paradigm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsrK-XuSZZQ
Open access article: Neocolonialism in the global economy of the 21st century: an overview, in: Momentum Quarterly 9 (3), 128-140. Open access: https://www.momentum-quarterly.org/ojs2/index.php/momentum/article/view/3478
New edited volume: Beyond the master's tools? Decolonizing knowledge orders, research methods and teaching. London: Rowman & Littlefield (with Franziska Müller and Daniel Bendix)https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786613592/Beyond-the-Master's-Tools-Decolonizing-Knowledge-Orders-Research-Methods-and-Teaching
New edited volume: The Development Dictionary @25: Post-Development and its consequences. London: Routledge.https://www.routledge.com/The-Development-Dictionary-25-Post-Development-and...
Open access book: Development Discourse and Global History. From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals. London: Routledge.https://www.routledge.com/Development-Discourse-and-Global-History-From-colo...
Open access article: Post-Development: Premature Burials and Haunting Ghosts. In: Development and Change 46 (4), 833-854. open access: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12177/full
Open access article: Post-development 25 years after The Development Dictionary, Third World Quarterly, 38:12, 2547-2558, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1383853
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing [email protected]http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
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Thanks, Irene - this is really helpful. Could you give us the links to the writings you refer to, so that we can get there faster? Do you think it is possible to rescue 'economics' from the English abuse of the word, or should we be looking at finding a new word or words to mean the use and sharing of resources within our Home, which is Earth? Christine On 27/06/22 21:10, Irene Sotiropoulou wrote:
Hello everyone, Many apologies, i will not enter the discussion about economics as such because i have enough material online for anyone who wants to have a look whether we can have economic knowledge that does not harm humans and nature. Two notes about the greek words, though, just to make sure that if you want to discuss etymologies, you do it properly: paidagogos. Pais=child, can be a girl or boy. In modern Greek we also have "to paidi" which is gender neutral. Agogos= from ago verb, means leading, guiding, doing by action. Paidagogos=also can be a woman or a man, means the person who gives agogi (culture and good manners) to children. The emphasis both in ancient and modern Greek is on cultural and social aspects of education, not just giving information in terms of formal knowledge. We use all those words today and paidagogiki (the art-science of paidagogos) is not just teaching things to be certified in a degree but more than that.
Oikonomia - economy. Nothing to do with the english ab-use of the word. Oikos=house in its extended form, i.e. not only the residence but the whole estate for a household. It also means family, in its extended form. Nomi-a, from verb nemo=sharing, using something. Nomos=law, i.e. rules about sharing and using resources. Oikonomia=sharing and using resources within oikos, creating rules about this sharing. I have written about this already, you may find the writings online. Have a nice day, Irene
Στις Κυρ 26 Ιουν 2022 στις 3:26 μ.μ., ο/η Steven J. Klees <[email protected]> έγραψε:
As someone schooled in neoclassical economics, I find both its neoliberal and liberal variants bankrupt. I find alternative approaches to economics most significant in what is being done in economics in practice by groups like GTA and others, as I have said in this blog:
https://evonomics.com/klees-neoclassical-economics-failed-what-comes-next/
There have been interesting attempts to break free of the neoclassical straightjacket in approaches like ecological economics and feminist economics, but too often they don't really break free. However, sometimes under the label "political economy" you have true alternatives that start with the bankruptcy of capitalism ("political economy" is also used by the right). The World Economics Association takes a "heterodox" stance (in opposition to "orthodox" economics which is another term for neoclassical) and publishes a list of alternative texts, some of which offer more sensible approaches to economics:
https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/textbook-commentaries/alternative-...
Best, Steve
On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 6:38 AM Ashish Kothari <[email protected]> wrote:
This is interesting, friends. Though, does it not depend on what definition of 'economics' we are accepting as legitimate? Its original meaning (from 'oikos' ... and therefore also linked to ecology) is 'management of the home' ... so if ecology is put at the base ('understanding the home') and we relate to the Earth our home in ways that reflect a deep understanding, is that not something humans have been doing forever?
So, do we accept the modernist westernised version of 'economics', or the much broader, deeper meaning of it ... do we discard it totally because it is badly corrupted/co-opted, or do we rescue it? This relates to one of my favourite pre-occupations, of understanding original meanings of words, and seeing if there is subversive/revolutionary potential in rescuing them, or are they so inextricably embedded in the system we are fighting against, that its best to abandon them and find alternatives? An eminently 'pedagogical' quest, I suppose.
And in that spirit, note that the term 'pedagogy', at least according to my laptop's inbuilt dictionary, comes from a v. dubious origin: "lateMiddle English: viaLatinfromGreekpaidagōgos, denoting a slavewhoaccompanieda child to school (frompais,paid-‘boy’+agōgos‘guide’)." I found this out to my utter chagrin /after /having suggested PeDAGoG (Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group) as the acronym for this network! So in this case, its not about rescuing the original meaning, but giving it a new, v. different, one! But sorry, let this observation not distract from the main topic of conversation here ... whether economics should or should not be in curricula, and it is should, waht should be its contours/substance (and /not /going further here into whether formal curricula should exist in the first place :):)
ashish
New, for post-COVID dignified livelihoods in India! Vikalp Sutra <https://sutra.vikalpsangam.org/>
FREE DOWNLOAD! Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary <https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/pluriverse>
Ashish Kothari
Kalpavriksh
Apt 5 Shree Datta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana
Pune 411004, India
Tel: 91-20-25654239; 91-20-25675450
Kalpavriksh <https://kalpavriksh.org/>
Vikalp Sangam <http://vikalpsangam.org/>
Radical Ecological Democracy <http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/>
Global Tapestry of Alternatives <http://www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org/>
https://ashishkothari51.blogspot.com
Twitter <https://twitter.com/chikikothari> LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishkothari1961> Instagram <https://www.instagram.com/ashishkotharivikalp/> Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/ashish.kothari.1297>
On 26/06/22 2:08 pm, Aram Ziai wrote:
Dear all,
I agree and wanted to point out that Escobar has described already in 95 economics as a cultural discourse imagining itself to be a science... but also that the 'problem' of population growth is usually focusing on poor people in the South (who use far far less resources and emit far far less CO2 than the global middle class) and of course on women (whose right to control their body is compromised) thus has racist and sexist elements.
Best
Aram
On 25.06.22 22:37, Christine Dann wrote:
Kia ora tatou
I wonder if it is possible for /any/ economics curriculum to be satisfactory. In Bruno Latour's view (see the quotes from/After Lockdown Metamorphosis/, 2021, below) 'economics' is an invention which has been and is still imposed with force. It obscures reality at best, and destroys it at worst.
It was interesting to see in the philanthropy article which Christian provided the link to that 'philanthropy' now includes creating pro-capitalist propaganda. This reinforces Latour's point that a lot of work has gone and continues to go into creating the pseudo-reality of 'economics' and the Economy. It can be 'soft' work, like the creation of 'philanthropic' propaganda; or 'hard' work, like the murder of indigenous people and their supporters trying to prevent further 'economic' extraction of the life of their lands, and the minerals beneath them.
It is still heretical these days to say that the Economy is not real, and we should focus on what is, and stop aiming to grow the Economy until it has devoured the Earth and all on it. It has been heretical for 50 years now, since the /Limits to Growth/ report was published in 1972, and a very small new party in a very small new-ish state (the New Zealand Values Party) put out an election manifesto with two key policies - Zero Economic Growth and Zero Population Growth. I don't know of any political party which has been so bold since - and you probably all know the connections between economic and population growth and how problematic both are these days. Also the connections with fossil fuel extraction and use.
If I were a teenager today and had a choice between studying economics in a classroom or learning gardening in a community garden, I know what the smart choice would be.
Christine
p 59 “This time round, it’s not just a matter of improving, changing, greening or revolutionising the ‘economic’ system, but of /completely doing without the Economy./”
p 60 “/Homo oeconomicus /has nothing native, natural or autochthonous about him, as we’ve long known. Strictly speaking, he comes from on high … /from the top down/, and not at all from ordinary practical experience, /from the ground up/, from the relationships that lifeforms maintain with other lifeforms.”
p 60 “For the Economy to expand … as the bedrock of all possible life on earth, an enormous amount of infrastructure building is required to impose it as an obvious fact against the dogged resistance put up by the most common experience in reaction to such violent colonisation.”
p 61 [Without this infrastructure] “no one would ever have invented ‘individuals’ capable of a selfishness drastic enough, constant enough, consistent enough to not ‘owe anyone anything’ and to see all others as ‘aliens’ and all life forms as ‘resources’. Beneath the evidence of a native, primal Economy lie three centuries of economisation….” [this preliminary embedding requires extreme violence]
p 62 [In order not to stay in the economisation trap, the way out proposed by Duzan Kazik] “… consists in /never agreeing/ to say of any subject whatever that ‘it has an economic dimension’! Bowing to that dimension … always boils down to suggesting that, on the one hand, there is a profound, essential, vital reality – the economic situation – but that on the other hand, we could nonetheless, if we had the time, take ‘other dimensions’ into account – social, moral, political dimensions and even, why not, if there’s anything left over, an ‘ecological dimension’… Well, reasoning accordingly means giving the Economy a material reality it doesn’t have, and lending a hand to a power that trickles down from on high.”
pp 74 - 75 “As soon as you describe a territory the right way round, you feel in your bones why the Economy could not be realistic or materialistic …. Embracing the Economy means interrupting the resumption of interactions by inventing beings who won’t have to account for themselves on the pretext that they’re autonomous individuals whose limits are protected by an exclusive right of ownership.”
On 25/06/22 06:21, Steven J. Klees wrote:
Dear Christian,
The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article.
Best, Steve
On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg <[email protected]> wrote:
Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism).
…oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism <https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism>
Thank you in advance for your interest and attention!
__
Christian Stalberg
Doctoral Student
Anthropology & Social Change
CIIS, San Francisco, CA
/"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis/
/“What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd/
/“//It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko///
/“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin/
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
-- Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai Chair of Development and Postcolonial Studies Executive Director Global Partnership Network Faculty of Social Sciences University of Kassel Nora-Platiel-Str. 1 34109 Kassel Germany ++49 561 804-3023 [email protected] https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/en/fachgruppen/politikwissenschaft/department... https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/global-partnership-network/home/
New video: Post-Development - Questioning the whole paradigm.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsrK-XuSZZQ
Open access article: Neocolonialism in the global economy of the 21st century: an overview, in: Momentum Quarterly 9 (3), 128-140. Open access:https://www.momentum-quarterly.org/ojs2/index.php/momentum/article/view/3478
New edited volume: Beyond the master's tools? Decolonizing knowledge orders, research methods and teaching. London: Rowman & Littlefield (with Franziska Müller and Daniel Bendix) https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786613592/Beyond-the-Master's-Tools-Decolonizing-Knowledge-Orders-Research-Methods-and-Teaching
New edited volume: The Development Dictionary @25: Post-Development and its consequences. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Development-Dictionary-25-Post-Development-and...
Open access book: Development Discourse and Global History. From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals. London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Development-Discourse-and-Global-History-From-colo...
Open access article: Post-Development: Premature Burials and Haunting Ghosts. In: Development and Change 46 (4), 833-854. open access:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12177/full
Open access article: Post-development 25 years after The Development Dictionary, Third World Quarterly, 38:12, 2547-2558,https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1383853
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
Hi Christine, Many languages have terms about the economy and economic activity, but we do not pay attention. Some links that might be useful, because I work on this question for many years now https://www.academia.edu/2330013/Economic_activity_in_Greece_without_officia... its summary https://www.academia.edu/4071931/Terms_and_their_economies_2013 a study about Cretan language-dialect and non-monetary economics https://www.academia.edu/7009373/Cretan_Terms_for_non_monetary_transactions this is an experimental study concerning terms related to collective land management management https://www.academia.edu/37466687/Moires_and_Miri_lands_Some_linguistic_coin... this one who is to be published soon as a paper, showing that language contains not only other economic ideas but also history we miss in official records. https://www.academia.edu/38064996/Many_languages_in_one_economy_or_many_econ... And this is the general approach through which I turned to use languages in economic research. https://www.academia.edu/43517939/What_is_Grassroots_Economics In general, giving up languages, dialects, or even slang to think about the economy is not a mistake of the "economy" but ours. Finally, a clarification: English language as such is not to blame, this is a people's creation and has more anticapitalist information than mainstream economic theory wants us to know. It is a certain class of people who turned the word economy into what we abhor today. Solidarity, Irene Στις Δευ 27 Ιουν 2022 στις 10:28 μ.μ., ο/η Christine Dann < [email protected]> έγραψε:
Thanks, Irene - this is really helpful. Could you give us the links to the writings you refer to, so that we can get there faster?
Do you think it is possible to rescue 'economics' from the English abuse of the word, or should we be looking at finding a new word or words to mean the use and sharing of resources within our Home, which is Earth?
Christine
On 27/06/22 21:10, Irene Sotiropoulou wrote:
Hello everyone, Many apologies, i will not enter the discussion about economics as such because i have enough material online for anyone who wants to have a look whether we can have economic knowledge that does not harm humans and nature. Two notes about the greek words, though, just to make sure that if you want to discuss etymologies, you do it properly: paidagogos. Pais=child, can be a girl or boy. In modern Greek we also have "to paidi" which is gender neutral. Agogos= from ago verb, means leading, guiding, doing by action. Paidagogos=also can be a woman or a man, means the person who gives agogi (culture and good manners) to children. The emphasis both in ancient and modern Greek is on cultural and social aspects of education, not just giving information in terms of formal knowledge. We use all those words today and paidagogiki (the art-science of paidagogos) is not just teaching things to be certified in a degree but more than that.
Oikonomia - economy. Nothing to do with the english ab-use of the word. Oikos=house in its extended form, i.e. not only the residence but the whole estate for a household. It also means family, in its extended form. Nomi-a, from verb nemo=sharing, using something. Nomos=law, i.e. rules about sharing and using resources. Oikonomia=sharing and using resources within oikos, creating rules about this sharing. I have written about this already, you may find the writings online. Have a nice day, Irene
Στις Κυρ 26 Ιουν 2022 στις 3:26 μ.μ., ο/η Steven J. Klees <[email protected]> έγραψε:
As someone schooled in neoclassical economics, I find both its neoliberal and liberal variants bankrupt. I find alternative approaches to economics most significant in what is being done in economics in practice by groups like GTA and others, as I have said in this blog:
https://evonomics.com/klees-neoclassical-economics-failed-what-comes-next/
There have been interesting attempts to break free of the neoclassical straightjacket in approaches like ecological economics and feminist economics, but too often they don't really break free. However, sometimes under the label "political economy" you have true alternatives that start with the bankruptcy of capitalism ("political economy" is also used by the right). The World Economics Association takes a "heterodox" stance (in opposition to "orthodox" economics which is another term for neoclassical) and publishes a list of alternative texts, some of which offer more sensible approaches to economics:
https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/textbook-commentaries/alternative-...
Best, Steve
On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 6:38 AM Ashish Kothari <[email protected]> wrote:
This is interesting, friends. Though, does it not depend on what definition of 'economics' we are accepting as legitimate? Its original meaning (from 'oikos' ... and therefore also linked to ecology) is 'management of the home' ... so if ecology is put at the base ('understanding the home') and we relate to the Earth our home in ways that reflect a deep understanding, is that not something humans have been doing forever?
So, do we accept the modernist westernised version of 'economics', or the much broader, deeper meaning of it ... do we discard it totally because it is badly corrupted/co-opted, or do we rescue it? This relates to one of my favourite pre-occupations, of understanding original meanings of words, and seeing if there is subversive/revolutionary potential in rescuing them, or are they so inextricably embedded in the system we are fighting against, that its best to abandon them and find alternatives? An eminently 'pedagogical' quest, I suppose.
And in that spirit, note that the term 'pedagogy', at least according to my laptop's inbuilt dictionary, comes from a v. dubious origin: "late Middle English: via Latin from Greek paidagōgos, denoting a slave who accompanied a child to school (from pais, paid- ‘boy’ + agōgos ‘guide’)." I found this out to my utter chagrin *after *having suggested PeDAGoG (Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group) as the acronym for this network! So in this case, its not about rescuing the original meaning, but giving it a new, v. different, one! But sorry, let this observation not distract from the main topic of conversation here ... whether economics should or should not be in curricula, and it is should, waht should be its contours/substance (and *not *going further here into whether formal curricula should exist in the first place :):)
ashish
New, for post-COVID dignified livelihoods in India! Vikalp Sutra <https://sutra.vikalpsangam.org/>
FREE DOWNLOAD! Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary <https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/pluriverse>
Ashish Kothari
Kalpavriksh
Apt 5 Shree Datta Krupa
908 Deccan Gymkhana
Pune 411004, India
Tel: 91-20-25654239; 91-20-25675450
Kalpavriksh <https://kalpavriksh.org/>
Vikalp Sangam <http://vikalpsangam.org/>
Radical Ecological Democracy <http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/>
Global Tapestry of Alternatives <http://www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org/>
https://ashishkothari51.blogspot.com
Twitter <https://twitter.com/chikikothari> LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishkothari1961> Instagram <https://www.instagram.com/ashishkotharivikalp/> Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/ashish.kothari.1297>
On 26/06/22 2:08 pm, Aram Ziai wrote:
Dear all,
I agree and wanted to point out that Escobar has described already in 95 economics as a cultural discourse imagining itself to be a science... but also that the 'problem' of population growth is usually focusing on poor people in the South (who use far far less resources and emit far far less CO2 than the global middle class) and of course on women (whose right to control their body is compromised) thus has racist and sexist elements.
Best
Aram
On 25.06.22 22:37, Christine Dann wrote:
Kia ora tatou
I wonder if it is possible for *any* economics curriculum to be satisfactory. In Bruno Latour's view (see the quotes from* After Lockdown Metamorphosis*, 2021, below) 'economics' is an invention which has been and is still imposed with force. It obscures reality at best, and destroys it at worst.
It was interesting to see in the philanthropy article which Christian provided the link to that 'philanthropy' now includes creating pro-capitalist propaganda. This reinforces Latour's point that a lot of work has gone and continues to go into creating the pseudo-reality of 'economics' and the Economy. It can be 'soft' work, like the creation of 'philanthropic' propaganda; or 'hard' work, like the murder of indigenous people and their supporters trying to prevent further 'economic' extraction of the life of their lands, and the minerals beneath them.
It is still heretical these days to say that the Economy is not real, and we should focus on what is, and stop aiming to grow the Economy until it has devoured the Earth and all on it. It has been heretical for 50 years now, since the *Limits to Growth* report was published in 1972, and a very small new party in a very small new-ish state (the New Zealand Values Party) put out an election manifesto with two key policies - Zero Economic Growth and Zero Population Growth. I don't know of any political party which has been so bold since - and you probably all know the connections between economic and population growth and how problematic both are these days. Also the connections with fossil fuel extraction and use.
If I were a teenager today and had a choice between studying economics in a classroom or learning gardening in a community garden, I know what the smart choice would be.
Christine
p 59 “This time round, it’s not just a matter of improving, changing, greening or revolutionising the ‘economic’ system, but of *completely doing without the Economy.*”
p 60 “*Homo oeconomicus *has nothing native, natural or autochthonous about him, as we’ve long known. Strictly speaking, he comes from on high … *from the top down*, and not at all from ordinary practical experience, *from the ground up*, from the relationships that lifeforms maintain with other lifeforms.”
p 60 “For the Economy to expand … as the bedrock of all possible life on earth, an enormous amount of infrastructure building is required to impose it as an obvious fact against the dogged resistance put up by the most common experience in reaction to such violent colonisation.”
p 61 [Without this infrastructure] “no one would ever have invented ‘individuals’ capable of a selfishness drastic enough, constant enough, consistent enough to not ‘owe anyone anything’ and to see all others as ‘aliens’ and all life forms as ‘resources’. Beneath the evidence of a native, primal Economy lie three centuries of economisation….” [this preliminary embedding requires extreme violence]
p 62 [In order not to stay in the economisation trap, the way out proposed by Duzan Kazik] “… consists in *never agreeing* to say of any subject whatever that ‘it has an economic dimension’! Bowing to that dimension … always boils down to suggesting that, on the one hand, there is a profound, essential, vital reality – the economic situation – but that on the other hand, we could nonetheless, if we had the time, take ‘other dimensions’ into account – social, moral, political dimensions and even, why not, if there’s anything left over, an ‘ecological dimension’… Well, reasoning accordingly means giving the Economy a material reality it doesn’t have, and lending a hand to a power that trickles down from on high.”
pp 74 - 75 “As soon as you describe a territory the right way round, you feel in your bones why the Economy could not be realistic or materialistic …. Embracing the Economy means interrupting the resumption of interactions by inventing beings who won’t have to account for themselves on the pretext that they’re autonomous individuals whose limits are protected by an exclusive right of ownership.”
On 25/06/22 06:21, Steven J. Klees wrote:
Dear Christian,
The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article.
Best, Steve
On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg < [email protected]> wrote:
Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism).
…oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism
Thank you in advance for your interest and attention!
__
Christian Stalberg
Doctoral Student
Anthropology & Social Change
CIIS, San Francisco, CA
*"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis*
*“What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd*
*“**It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko*
*“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin*
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
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-- Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai Chair of Development and Postcolonial Studies Executive Director Global Partnership Network Faculty of Social Sciences University of Kassel Nora-Platiel-Str. 1 34109 Kassel Germany ++49 561 [email protected]https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/en/fachgruppen/politikwissenschaft/department...
New video: Post-Development - Questioning the whole paradigm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsrK-XuSZZQ
Open access article: Neocolonialism in the global economy of the 21st century: an overview, in: Momentum Quarterly 9 (3), 128-140. Open access: https://www.momentum-quarterly.org/ojs2/index.php/momentum/article/view/3478
New edited volume: Beyond the master's tools? Decolonizing knowledge orders, research methods and teaching. London: Rowman & Littlefield (with Franziska Müller and Daniel Bendix)https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786613592/Beyond-the-Master's-Tools-Decolonizing-Knowledge-Orders-Research-Methods-and-Teaching
New edited volume: The Development Dictionary @25: Post-Development and its consequences. London: Routledge.https://www.routledge.com/The-Development-Dictionary-25-Post-Development-and...
Open access book: Development Discourse and Global History. From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals. London: Routledge.https://www.routledge.com/Development-Discourse-and-Global-History-From-colo...
Open access article: Post-Development: Premature Burials and Haunting Ghosts. In: Development and Change 46 (4), 833-854. open access: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12177/full
Open access article: Post-development 25 years after The Development Dictionary, Third World Quarterly, 38:12, 2547-2558, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1383853
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Dear all Thanks for this exchange. Gilbert Rist’s book provides valuable ideas for alternative economics curriculum. May be helpful. See: The Delusions of Economics The Misguided Certainties of a Hazardous Science https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Delusions-of-Economics-by-Gilb... <https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Delusions-of-Economics-by-Gilbert-Rist/9781848139237> Best wishes Michel
On 24 Jun 2022, at 19:21, Steven J. Klees <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Christian,
The CORE curriculum is an improvement over standard approaches in economics departments but it is fundamentally neoclassical. It moves away from neoliberalism but is firmly ensconced in a liberal view of markets and capitalism. Putting lipstick on a pig is, to me, an appropriate characterization. Check out the attached New Yorker article.
Best, Steve
On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 12:58 PM Christian Stalberg <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Sharing this resource. Would love to hear reactions. My kneejerk response was that this is simply putting lipstick on a pig (the pig being the systemic structural violence of capitalism).
https://www.core-econ.org/ <https://www.core-econ.org/>
…oh and if you would like to know where this initiative got its start, read this
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism <https://www.philanthropy.com/article/thinking-anew-about-capitalism> Thank you in advance for your interest and attention!
__
Christian Stalberg
Doctoral Student
Anthropology & Social Change
CIIS, San Francisco, CA
"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis
“What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd
“It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog <http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog> <CORE - Bowles et al new econ curriculum New Yorker article.pdf>_______________________________________________ GTA-PeDAGoG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ourproject.org/mailman/listinfo/gta-pedagog
This new book looks interesting: Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55644795-rentier-capitalism?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xwk6FXP9Ml&rank=1> __ Christian Stalberg Doctoral Student Anthropology & Social Change CIIS, San Francisco, CA "I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis “What is it that we can do that addresses whatever the problem is, rather than what it is that we’re trying to get somebody else to do.” – Alice Lynd “It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die.” – Steve Biko “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
participants (7)
-
Aram Ziai -
Ashish Kothari -
Christian Stalberg -
Christine Dann -
Irene Sotiropoulou -
Michel PIMBERT -
Steven J. Klees