Wondering why economists have not predicted serious financial crises? Shocked by economic assumptions of human behavior as self-centered and focusing only on what can be measured? Asking yourself if there are no sensible economic alternatives to free markets? Then you are at the right place to learn economics! This is the first online course that teaches economics from a pluralist perspective. Economic pluralism means that a plurality of theoretical and methodological viewpoints is regarded as valuable in itself and is simply the best way in which economics can make progress in understanding the world. This MOOC will illustrate economic pluralism not only in substance but also in form. You will see not only me, a Professor of Economics, but also a pop-up Prof of our business school, who illustrates the actor perspective of firms, government and civil society. And you will meet an online student, based in Greece, who will help you through the tutorial videos in which I will explain key concepts, tools and techniques. I will not limit myself to the dominant theory, as almost every other course does. Instead, I will introduce you to four very different economic theories for the whole set of standard topics in microeconomics and macroeconomics. The theories are presented every time from broad and more interdisciplinary to narrow and more mathematical. The four theories that I like to introduce you to are Social Economics, Institutional Economics, Post Keynesian economics and, at the very end of each topic, Neoclassical Economics, for the special case of ideally functioning markets. But not everything is different in this course. Like every economics course, it includes numbers, diagrams, tables, equations, and some calculations. Why would you go through the effort of learning the basics of four theories instead of one? Because it will help you to see why many economists cannot predict crises, whereas others can see signals but are often not being listened to because they do not belong to the dominant school of thought. It will also enable you to see that it is just one theory claiming economic agents to be self-centered and focusing on the measurable only. Other economic theories go well beyond these limitations. And, finally, the pluralist approach will provide you with policy alternatives to neoliberalist policies promoting free markets. The objective of this course is twofold. First, to enable you to understand different economic viewpoints, linked to important traditions in economic thought, and basic economic concepts belonging to these theoretical perspectives. Second, to enable you to do some basic economic calculations that are important in economic life, such as calculating an inflation rate, and in economic policies, such as estimating the rough gains from trade for both trading partners, and in economic arguments, such as in calculating utility maximization with given prices and budgets. I hope you will enjoy the course!
Post Keynesian Economics of Nature
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来自 Erasmus University Rotterdam 的课程
Introduction to Economic Theories
34 个评分
从本节课中
Macro Economics: Nature and Wellbeing & Poverty
与讲师见面
Irene van StaverenProf. dr.
International Institute of Social Studies (ISS)
Rob van TulderProf. dr.
Department of Business-Society Management, Rotterdam School of Management
Maria DafnomiliPhD researcher
International Institute of Social Studies
Welcome to the video on the Post Keynesian Economics of Nature.
I will discuss the relationship between economy and
nature with the help of key Keynesian concepts, namely uncertainty
with its environmental uncertainty to financial uncertainty.
I am sure that you will remember the difference between risks,
which is calculable because it has probabilities and
the uncertainty which is about the unknown.
Well, take this as a starting point and
you will have no problems understanding this presentation.
Ecological uncertainty includes climate change, nuclear disasters,
earthquakes, floods and droughts.
And these all can have negative effects on the economy.
Capital goods are destroyed such as buildings and factories.
Crops die so that there will be food scarcity.
And human lives are lost or hurt which affects labor markets and healthcare.
So just like Hyman Minsky claimed that financial fragility affects the real
economy, we can also state that ecological fragility affects the economy.
The precautionary principle is a recognition of uncertainty about possible
damage and irreversible effects caused by nature,
such as damage of earthquakes and floods and global warming.
Just like we need financial buffers and limits to financial activity to prevent
deep financial crisis, theory of nature claims that we need buffers and
limits in the exploitation of nature by the economy.
This is what the precautionary principal means.
How to do this?
Well, we start by recognizing that economy is an open system and
better than any closed system of the biosphere.
Just like social economics as I explained in the first video this week
going into ecological economics.
This close system of our planet dictates the planetary
boundaries in which we can live comfortably, and
our economy can function without leading to irreversible harm.
Scientists have identified ten planetary boundaries and have calculated
that currently we have already gone over three of these, risking our future.
I will mention the five key planetary boundaries, greenhouse gases,
biodiversity, pollution, fresh water use, and land use.
Just like in a case of reducing financial fragility, the reduction of
ecological fragility requires us to reduce the scale of operation.
Think about household and neighborhood level renewable energy production
with solar panels instead of a few big power stations in the country, or
recycling materials close to where the goods are consumed.
For example, for
old cars rather than transporting them miles away for recycling.
And explore local win, win solutions such as vegetable gardens on
the rooftops of apartment buildings which produce local food.
Serve as water sinks in case of heavy rains and
insulate buildings against heat in the summer.
Economics recognizes stocks as the amount of debt in the economy or
workers in the labor market.
And flows such as credit and young people leaving school and looking for work.
Economics of nature applies this to nature with the help of
ecological stock-flow model.
An ecological stock-flow model starts from the I=PAT equation of ecological economics
as we've seen in a video on the social economics of nature earlier this week.
Remember that I stands for environmental impact and this equals
population growth times effluence times the level of green technology.
We now relabel I as DMC, which stands for domestic material consumption.
This allows us to distinguish domestic resource use from
international resource use through imports.
So, we want to know how much natural resources a country uses within
its borders and we want to know how much resources it uses from other countries,
such as Imported wood, palm oil, steel, or oil.
DMC equal DE minus PTB.
DE stands for the domestic extraction of resources.
PTB refers to the physical trade balance, that is,
the net effect of imports of resources and exports of resources.
Finally, MI refers to material intensity.
It refers to the material intensity of consumption.
Remember that all laptops were bigger and heavier than new ones.
So the lower MI the less material is used for the same consumer good.
This all leads to the ecological stock flow model in which domestic
material consumption, DMC equals P for population size,
times A for affluence of consumption and times MI for material impact.
This stock flow model of the introduction between nature and the economy
helps to make clear that the damaging effect of consumption of a country
depends on population growth, effluence in its consumption pattern, and
the intensity of resource use both from its own territory and
imported from other countries resource stocks.
The diagram on the slide shows you the development of material intensity,
the MI variable from the model.
In the Asia Pacific region, it's compared to the rest of the world.
You see, in a horizontal x is years between 1970 and 2008.
On the vertical axis there is tons per capita of material intensity.
Now the green line shows that in the Asia-Pacific region material intensity
has increased, where as in the rest of the world the light blue line,
it has declined per capita.
So in Asia-Pacific region, people have been using more and
more material per person.
Now this diagram shows the trend in DMC, the Domestic Material Consumption.
Again the x axis shows years between 1970 and 2008.
And y axis shows tons per capita.
We see that in the Asia-Pacific region DMC is steadily increasing,
where as in the rest of the world, it has started to decline.
Do we think that this is because of population growth in the region?
Well, interestingly the increase in domestic material consumption in
the Asia Pacific region is not so much attributable to population growth.
The two variable a affluence that is increased consumption per capita.
This means that when we look for limits and buffers for
that region, we should not focus on limiting population growth but
rather on limiting the material impact of consumption.
This model concludes the video on the post Keynesian economics of nature.
I hope that the parallel to financial fragility is helpful for you, and
that you found it insightful to learn that environmental uncertainty
is more affected by consumption growth per person than by population growth.
The next video presents the new classical theory of nature which argues that
markets for the right to pollute are the most efficient solution to
reduce pollution because firms have to buy these rights and this can be costly.
Curious how this works?
Watch the next video.
