Subjects Archives: Political Economy

The Trump administration is dismantling the very programs created to correct generations of systemic racism and economic exclusion—programs that helped level the playing field for Black, Latino, Indigenous, and women entrepreneurs.

THE mercantilists had defined a nation’s prosperity in terms of the amount of precious metals it possessed and a nation’s progress in terms of the increase in its amount of precious metals.

We speak with Lauren Arrington about her forthcoming book on women artists in the Federal Arts Project. The Great Depression rendered 140,000 women and girls across the United States homeless. In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that employed 8.5 million people over the course of eight years. In her book, Arrington challenges the popular memory of WPA art as a story of straight white men. Instead, she argues that the works of art that many women created under the Federal Arts Project made visible Black, immigrant, and women’s lives in a way that challenged segregationist, xenophobic, and sexist structures intrinsic in the nation’s institutions.

There are a million ways to slice and dice both a universal Medicare plan and also the transition, which will pose real problems. However, it is important any plan be comprehensive. That doesn’t mean it has to cover the plastic surgery needed to give people the Mar-a-Lago look, but it does need to cover areas like dental, vision, and hearing, which are excluded from traditional Medicare.

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.