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The opening sentence of the 2011 book, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil by the historian Timothy Mitchell, reads “Fossil fuels helped create both the possibility of modern democracy and its limits.” Carbon democracy is “a certain kind of democratic politics.” He observes: “Countries that depend upon petroleum resources for a large part of their earnings from exports tend to be less democratic.” Mitchell wants to moor that democracy in the materiality of coal and oil,...

I’ve never been a fan of uniforms in general and school uniforms in particular. Recently, I was unimpressed by the insistence of numerous state schools in Queensland that girls should be forced to wear dresses even if they would rather wear shorts or pants. The Minister eventually overrode them, but the episode was a pretty clear indication that uniform rules are about the arbitrary exercise of authority, not making kids more comfortable at school. I was reminded of this by a report...

from Lars Syll ‘Modern’ economics has become increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. In his seminal book Economics and Reality(1997), Tony Lawson traced this irrelevance to the failure of economists to match their deductive-axiomatic methods with their subject It is — sad to say — as relevant today as it was twenty years ago. It is still a fact that within mainstream economics internal validity is everything and external validity nothing. Why anyone should be...

Most downloaded RWER papers from current issue Who is behind the campaign to rid the world of cash?, Norbert HaeringThe trouble with human capital theory, Blair FixA progressive trade policy, Dean BakerThe enigmatization of economic growth, Bernard C. Beaudreau Most downloaded RWER papers from last 4 years Trump is Obama’s legacy. Will this break up the Democratic Party?, Michael HudsonChina’s communist-capitalist ecological apocalypse, Richard SmithInequality, the financial crisis and...

This paper argues the mainstream economics profession is threatened by theories of the financial crisis and ensuing stagnation that attribute those events to the policies recommended and justified by the profession. Such theories are existentially threatening to the dominant point of view. Consequently, mainstream economists resist engaging them as doing so would legitimize those theories. […]

from Constantine Passaris and the current issue of RWER I have coined the word internetization for the purpose of circumventing the drawbacks of the concept of globalization. These drawbacks commence with the fact that globalization is not a new concept. The international outreach between nations has taken place since time immemorial. Furthermore, globalization does not reflect the contemporary digital empowerment of civil society and the electronic facility for modern financial...

from Lars Syll If human scientists could be supposed to play a system of analogous games of chance … the evidential support available for successful scientific hypotheses could be measured by a Pascalian probability-function … But unfortunately the analogy breaks down at several points. The number of co-ordinate alternative outcomes​ that are possible in any one trial of the issue investigated may be infinite, indeterminate, or at least unknowable … And even more importantly, the trial...