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Heilbroner Center Director Julia Ott provided The Nation magazine with a list of five recent university press books that are “fundamental to understanding our current crisis.” A quick look at her list: MAHOGANY The Costs of Luxury 
in Early America by Jennifer L. Anderson LAND OF THE FEE Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American

In her guest post for the Society of U.S. Intellectual History Blog, titled “Marginalized Economists: Revisiting Robert Heilbroner,” Rachel M. Cohen argues for the continuing significance of “arguably the most prominent dissenting American economist of the late twentieth century.” “While historians have begun to take interest in the history of economic thought, the tendency to

Johanna Oksala, one of the faculty who taught Rethinking Capitalism in Spring 2016, delivered her remarks about Paul Mason’s recent book on April 1, 2016. Watch the video of Johanna Oksala’s Comments on Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future on Public Seminar.

Public Seminar this week features Brent Cebul’s reflections on precarity and flexible workplaces. By the early 1990s, Jay Chiat had reached the pinnacle of the advertising world thanks to his firm’s iconic campaigns, especially the Absolut Vodka bottle print ads and Apple’s “Think Different” and “1984” spots. Flush with cash, Chiat commissioned the architect Frank Gehry to design

On Public Seminar this week, McKenzie Wark reflects on the creative industries. The fate of cultural studies in the United States appears to be twofold. On the one hand, it still generates moral panic. Right-wing nut-jobbers think that “cultural Marxism” is some insidious, decadent creed, probably created by Jews and Blacks to destroy America. On the other

On Public Seminar this week, Robert Pollin weighs in on the dilemma of green growth. “The World Resources Council recently reported that between 2000 and 2014, 21 countries, including the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Spain and Sweden, all managed to “decouple” GDP growth from CO2 emissions — i.e. GDP in these countries expanded over this

The post cites research by Teresa Ghilarducci at The New School’s Schwarz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, which shows that low-income households are more likely than high- or middle-income households to “raid their retirement savings” when experiencing an income shock. A possible solution? “Mandatory savings accounts with no early access.” Read the article here: How

Public Seminar this week features an interview with economist Anwar Shaikh about his new book, Capitalism. Anwar Shaikh has been teaching economics at The New School for 42 years. One of the world’s leading heterodox economists, he argues that the neoclassical models taught at most universities are bad tools for analyzing capitalism. He hopes that

McKenzie Wark troubles the term “capitalism” on Public Seminar this week: One thing that the left and right now seem to agree on is that the society in which we live is called capitalism. And strangely enough, both now seem to agree that it is eternal. Even the left seems to think there is an