Radical and Heterodox Economics

Radical economics, the term as much as the theories behind it, is fundamentally a phenomenon of the 1960s and the academia in the United States, intrinsically tied to the upheavals of that transformative decade, in particular the Civil Rights movement and the war in Vietnam. The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) was the result of that boom in interest for alternative approaches to the mainstream. I don’t intend to write a history of URPE, in this brief post, but I want to contrast Radical Economics with the term Heterodox Economics, which has gained traction more recently (see Ngram viewer figure).

Read rest here.

PS: I started blogging at the URPE blog too. Check it out here.

On why the Golden Age of Capitalism was better than this revived Gilded Age

No need for a lot of discussion. The Golden Age of Capitalism (in the graph 1947-79)--the world that resulted from the reforms to deal with the Great Depression (the New Deal) and the reorganization of the world after the victory against Fascism, with strong unions, high taxes for the rich, and a string of social programs for the poor and minorities--was a better world.