Subjects Archives: Political Economy

I hope readers will share this note and it prompts debate about the current fragility of pluralism in heterodox economics and society.

JEAN-BAPTISTE Say, a French economist who wrote in the late eighteenth century, had formulated a law to the effect that ‘supply creates its own demand’, which meant that there could never be an inadequate demand for the aggregate of goods produced in any economy.

Once plundered of both its wealth and people by colonial powers, Africa now faces IMF-imposed austerity, obscene debt, and forced underdevelopment.

With President Donald Trump and his team launching an aggressive attack on international institutions and threatening to pull out from many of them, there has been speculation about whether they would adopt the same strategy with respect to the Bretton Woods institutions.

Simply building new homes isn’t enough to solve the housing crisis—what we build and for whom matters a lot more.

We might soon see the Trump Administration impose tariffs on pharmaceuticals. U.S. patients will suffer.

In this episode, Money on the Left shares audio from “The Black University & Community Currencies,” a public workshop convened by Professor Andrew J. Douglas at Morehouse College on April 25, 2025. This episode presents Part 1 of the workshop. It features an introduction by Professor Douglas and two panels. The first panel is titled “What is Public Money?” (Delman Coates, Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson. The second asks: “What is the Uni Currency Proposal?” (Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson). 

Francophone Africa was never fully decolonised.

Starbucks, the largest coffee chain in the world and the 120th richest corporation in the United States, is being brought to court after being exposed for using slave labor in their coffee production chain.

The U.S., particularly oligarchs like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Harlan Crow, and Rupert Murdoch, seeks to shape the world according to their own image. The hypothetical Mar-A-Lago accord, proposed by the Hudson Institute–a neoconservative think tank funded by right-wing billionaires–lays out a position paper calling for the U.S. government to restructure the global trade and financial architecture.

To a person unfamiliar with India’s history and political economy, the Indian government’s response to Trump’s actions must be puzzling.

Throughout his life, Martin Luther King Jr spoke often and with vision about the nature of capitalism.

Understanding media coverage of healthcare price battles.

Every dollar added to the world’s military budgets takes us closer to a potentially apocalyptic scenario of world war.

Walking along the thoroughfares of the Russian capital these days, it’s easy to feel as though you’ve gone “Back to the Future.” Like Marty McFly in the classic 1985 movie, visitors to Moscow might imagine they’ve traveled back in time to the Soviet past, when socialism beat Hitler and the future of communism beckoned on […]

ELEMENTARY textbooks in economics invariably begin with a completely mythical concept: the concept of “perfect competition”, which is different from the concept of “free competition” that the classical economists and Marx had used.

U.S.-led sanctions (more aptly referred to as Unilateral Coercive Measures) caused Venezuela to lose oil revenue equivalent to 213% of its GDP between January 2017 and December 2024, resulting in losses of roughly $77 million per day. Who is the real target of these and other unilateral coercive measures?

The scale and pace of the genocide in Gaza is accelerated by the direct and indirect contributions of American universities.

A cornerstone of Donald Trump’s economic policies is tariffs. Claiming that just about every country in the world has ripped off the United States—even stating that the European Union was established to do this—he sees tariffs as a way for the U.S. to get even.

“The massive income and wealth inequality that exists in America today is not just an economic issue, it is literally a matter of life and death,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.