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Introduction to how the Netherlands are going about to fix a housing shortage issue. Topping involves adding another floor or layer to an already existing building in the Netherlands for housing purposes. According to government officials, the results of such an effort is great: at least 100,000 homes can be realized with topping up. Topping is also popular in the Netherlands according to the government. More and more municipalities, housing...

from Lars Syll We all heterodox economists who have chosen the road ‘less traveled by’ know that this choice comes at a price. Fewer opportunities to secure ample research funding or positions at prestigious institutes or universities. Nevertheless, yours truly believes that very few of us regret our choices. One doesn’t bargain with one’s conscience. No amount of money or prestige in the world can replace the feeling of looking in the mirror and liking what one sees. My friend Axel...

I’ve been consistently critical of the Labor party since Anthony Albanese became leader after Labor’s narrow but unexpected loss in 2019. It’s always easy to fall prey to confirmation bias in this kind of thing, making much of the bad and ignoring the good. To check my beliefs, I’m taking a widely circulated list of Labor’s claimed achievements, and giving my own responses. This is by no means a complete list of the governments achievements, and of course it doesn’t mention failures,...

from Dean Baker It is more than a bit bizarre reading pieces that talk about automation or job-killing AI as something new and alien. These are forms of productivity growth. They allow more goods and services to be produced for each hour of human labor. Productivity growth is usually thought of as a good thing. It’s the reason that we don’t have half the U.S. workforce employed in agriculture growing our food. Instead, it is around 1.0 percent of the U.S. workforce, and we grow enough to...

from Asad Zaman and WEA Pedagogy Blog Introduction: Beyond the Jungle For centuries, capitalism has told us that land is a commodity to be bought, sold, and exploited for profit. It has also sold us a dangerous myth: that humans are inherently competitive, isolated individuals, destined to fight for survival in a brutal world. According to this worldview, land belongs to those who claim it first and use it for personal gain. But this idea is not only destructive—it’s profoundly false....

My latest in The Guardian Announcements from major employers, including Amazon and Tabcorp, that workers will be required to return to the office five days a week have a familiar ring. There has been a steady flow of such directives. The Commonwealth Bank CEO, Matt Comyn, attracted a lot of attention with an announcement that workers would be required to attend the office for a minimum of 50% of the time, while the NSW public service was recently asked to return to the office at...

from Peter Radford What?  Surely not!  How dare he suggest such a thing. What, you are correct in asking, am I talking about? The recent speech by a Department of Justice official who dared suggest that it is getting quite difficult to find a truly neutral technocratic expert to give testimony in court.  Imagine the cheek.  How dare he question ‘expertise’.  Especially economic expertise, which is, surely, the gold standard. Why did he say what he said? Because academics are apparently so...

This paper investigates the impact of different varieties of capitalism (VoC) on societal happiness. It begins with a critique of Neoclassical welfare economics which emphasizes Pareto optimality, and it argues for focusing on reported societal happiness. The paper identifies five VoC. Using a sample of twenty-six high-income countries drawn from the 2020 World Happiness Report, […]

from Lars Syll Based on our interviews, heterodox economics appears to be a positive project, inevitably defined somewhat in terms of the mainstream but not exhaustively so. It is also efficacious, with policy and real-world impact. It is a complex object, not amenable to definition by a single criterion. Its dimensions are partly intellectual, in terms of what it believes. It holds a realist position. It is concerned with asymmetric power relations, in the economy and in the economics...

from Peter Radford Is it a cult? Is it a guild? Both perhaps? I remember reading sometime not long ago that Steve Levitt was leaving Chicago.  Two things stood out in the article bringing that news:  first, Levitt said he was concerned that economics was becoming irrelevant; second, someone had told him he was not doing ‘proper economics’. Here’s a clue who that someone was: Heckman. Then, more recently, the Financial Times editorial page accused the economics discipline of becoming a...