As the pandemic continues on, a new consensus is emerging. After the pandemic, we do not want to return to normal – we want to build back better.
We are pleased to bring you Issue 5 of this year’s journal. In it are discussed numerous problems with today’s system, how they are being revealed by the pandemic, and the ways to rethink those problems in order to address them. As always, we hope you disagree with some, take hope from others, and learn from all about how to build a new, sustainable, just economy.
The Editors
Table of Contents
In University Education as in Many Other Industries, COVID-19 is a Crisis of Casualisation
For anyone with an interest in the higher education system today, the anxiety is palpable. The ‘Job-Ready Graduates’ package has passed the Senate while universities, instead of speaking out, seemed content to bargain with the government and trade off affordable higher education for negligible promises of extra student places or...
Colonial Conservation: The UN proposes the “biggest land grab in history”
Survival International, an NGO that champions tribal peoples around the world, has issued a warning about a proposed UN plan to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030. At the next Convention on Biological Diversity summit, world leaders plan to agree on turning 30% of the Earth into “Protected...
Capitalism is idealism, perfected
For many of us, the market is an actual gathering of human buyers and sellers, chatting, tasting and sharing produce, which is often fresh and artisanal. At market benches and shop counters, people display and take in a community meal. Mainstream economists turned that market into differential equations. In so...
On Unemployment
Many people think of unemployment pretty much as mainstream economists and the government would have us think about it – that it is a statistical number of people looking for work according to a rather arbitrary definition set by the government. It is much more than that. The reluctance to...
What is it like being an economics student?
I’m sure many of you will have read David Graeber’s recent article in the New York Review of Books, called "Against Economics". He opens with the statement that "There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no...
James Mumford’s ‘Vexed’, Reviewed
If you had to pick a defining characteristic of the year 2020, you could do worse than nominate polarisation – the division of people into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions/beliefs. Everywhere across the Western World, deep splits are entrenching on fundamental issues of public interest: from climate...