mathbabe

I’ll going to be giving a plenary talk on Tuesday, July 24th at the CPE Summer Institute 2012, which is being held this summer at Columbia the week of July 23rd – July 27th. I’ll be joined by Richard Wolff, an economist, radio show host, and author of multiple books, most recently Occupy the Economy. You can register for the Institute here (sliding scale).

The Summer Institute open to non-experts to teach them about the financial system and economics. They have two core courses, one based in the U.S. and the other international. From their web page:

The U.S. Economy/ Topics include

»     Roots of the economic meltdown and solutions
»     Speculation, finance and housing bubbles
»     Economy, race, class and gender
»     Economic histories – from personal to global
»     Labor and jobs
»     Democratizing the Federal Reserve and banks.
»     Economic alternatives, socialism and the solidarity economy

The International Economy/ Topics include

»     Roots of the economic meltdown and solutions
»     Brief history of the global economy
»     International trade, production and finance
»     The IMF, World Bank, WTO
»     Global climate change and the environment
»     Creating a new world economy

In addition to hosting this cool and open Summer Institute, the Center for Popular Economics also recently came out with a booklet explaining some economic history of the U.S. written for the non-expert; take a look here.

I’m about halfway through, and I’ve spotted things you usually don’t see in economics texts you might read in high school, such as the following phrase:

So What Caused This Crisis?
Neoliberal capitalism has had three features that both explain how it promoted 25 years of economic expansions and why it led to a massive crisis in 2008. First, inequality grew rapidly, as profits rose while workers’ wages actually fell. From 1979 to 2007, the average inflation-corrected hourly wage of non-supervisory workers declined by 1 percent, while inflation-corrected nonfinancial corporate profits after taxes rose by a remarkable 255 percent. While surging profits pleased the capitalists, it brought a problem: who could buy the growing output that comes with economic expansion? The solution was debt. Somehow, people would have to borrow more and more if a form of capitalism that brings skyrocketing profits and falling wages was to function.

I think it would be cool to have a typical high school “history of economics” text side by side with this one, and have students read both and argue them.

I’m going to try to go to as much of the Summer Institute as I can as a student. I hope I see you there!