Econ4
= economics for people, for the planet, and for the future
URL = http://econ4.org/
See also: Occupy Economics
Description
"Our aim is to change both the economics profession and common-sense understanding about how the economy works and should work. For this we need to disseminate new ideas, train the new generation of scholars and public intellectuals, and advance new research agendas."
Discussion
The Mission of Econ4
"The economic crisis we face today is not only a crisis of the economy. It is also a crisis of economics. The free-market fundamentalism that attained ideological dominance in the final decades of the 20th century has been discredited by financial collapse, global imbalances, mass unemployment, and environmental degradation. To confront these challenges, we need an economics for the 21st century.
We need an economics for open minds that breaks free of the closed-minded economic dogmas of the past. We need an economics that aims to secure long-run human well-being, not an economics preoccupied with maximizing short-run output and profits. We need an economics that recognizes that we need to safeguard the Earth for our children and generations to come. We need an economics for people, the planet, and the future.
Economics for our times and for our shared future requires profound departures from the orthodox economics of the past.
To secure long-run human well-being, an economy must meet four necessary conditions:
A level playing field
Every child ought to have equivalent opportunities for economic advancement. A child’s life chances should not depend upon accidents of birth such as race, gender, or parental income. Access to food, health care, education, and a clean and safe environment are basic human rights. These are not commodities that ought to be allocated on the basis of purchasing power, nor privileges to be bestowed on the basis of political power. A level playing field requires fairness in the distribution of these elements of private and social wealth.
Resilience
A healthy economy is a resilient economy able to withstand unanticipated shocks. To borrow a metaphor from the physical sciences, resilience is the ability to bounce without breaking. We can build resilience into our economy and its infrastructure by following the design principles of diversity and dispersion. The aim is not to maximize “efficiency” at a single point in time, but rather to minimize economic vulnerability over time.
True-cost pricing
The prices that guide economic decisions in markets and government policies must be based on a full accounting of costs and benefits. When costs such as pollution – or benefits such as care for children and the elderly – are hidden from view, the result is implicit subsidies and taxes that deflect incentives away from the goal of long-run well-being. Costs that are hidden from view can grow over time, as in the case of global warming pollution; and benefits that are hidden from view can erode over time, as in the provision of unpaid labor for care of dependents. A full accounting of costs and benefits does not mean that non-monetary aspects of well-being such as liberty, community, and life expectancy must be translated into dollars and cents. It means that non-market values should not be ignored and thereby effectively valued at zero.
Real democracy
An effective economy requires transparency, accountability, and democratic governance. Institutions in the private, non-profit and public sectors alike will serve long-run well-being only if safeguarded from capture by powerful players pursuing their own myopic self-interest. This can be secured only by a democratic distribution of power. A central goal of education, including economics education, must be to equip students for a life of active citizenship.
These are the central pillars of Econ4: economics for people, for the planet, and for the future." (http://econ4.org/about/mission)