Heterodox Economics
Schools that challenge neoclassical orthodoxy — feminist, ecological, MMT, complexity economics. United by skepticism of perfect rationality and market equilibrium.
Sub-topics
Challenges economics' blindness to gender. Unpaid care work, the household as a site of production, and gendered labor markets are central concerns. Marilyn Waring's If Women Counted (1988) was a landmark.
The economy is a subsystem of the biosphere, not the other way around. Herman Daly and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen argued that infinite growth on a finite planet is thermodynamically impossible.
A sovereign currency issuer can never run out of money — it creates money when it spends and destroys it when it taxes. Deficits are not inherently bad; the real constraint is inflation, not insolvency.
W. Brian Arthur and the Santa Fe Institute (1980s-present). The economy is a complex adaptive system — agents adapt, equilibrium is the exception, and emergent phenomena like bubbles and crashes are endogenous.
A political and economic movement arguing that endless GDP growth is ecologically unsustainable and socially unnecessary. Advocates for reduced production and consumption in wealthy nations.
Why are some countries rich and others poor? From Rostow's stages of growth to Sen's capabilities, the field grapples with poverty, inequality, and how nations can develop sustainably.