Heterodox Economics Newsletter

Issue 365October 05, 2026 web pdf Heterodox Economics Directory

For more than a decade, I have been writing editorials for the Heterodox Economics Newsletter. Some commented on current events; others reflected on developments in economics, academia, or the wider world. A few dealt with the peculiar pleasures and recurring frustrations involved in doing pluralist research or keeping academic infrastructure alive.

Until now, these texts were dispersed across individual Newsletter issues. This made them part of the record, but not a particularly accessible one: finding an old editorial often required remembering roughly when it was written—or being willing to browse through a considerable number of past issues.

This has now changed. The editorials have found a new, searchable home in the HEN Blog:

https://www.heterodoxnews.com/blog 🦄🎉

Making these texts easier to access has produced an unexpected effect: taken together, they form a small and necessarily subjective archive of heterodox economics over the last decade. They document intellectual debates, changing institutional conditions, political events, organisational experiments, and recurring concerns over pluralism, academic freedom, and the survival of independent scholarly spaces.

Of course, not every editorial has aged equally well. Some diagnoses look overly optimistic in retrospect; others remain uncomfortably familiar. But this is perhaps precisely why such an archive may be useful. It reminds us that heterodox economics is not only a set of theoretical traditions or research programmes. It is also a community that must continually build, maintain, revise, and sometimes defend the institutions that make intellectual exchange possible.

The Newsletter has always depended on collective effort. I am deeply grateful to the many people who have helped sustain it: our volunteer IT support, the colleagues who have offered advice and encouragement, the editorial assistants who have contributed their time and skills, and the many readers, contributors, and IAPHE members who have made the Newsletter possible. So in case you value the Heterodox Economics Newsletter as a key academic infrastructre, please consider supporting IAPHE as a member or volunteer (just send a short email in case you are interested).

In that sense, the HEN Blog is not just a repository of past texts. Independent intellectual communities need more than good ideas. They also need places where those ideas can meet, circulate, and be remembered. It requires some care: attention, cooperation, material support, and people willing to do often invisible work.

All the best,

Jakob

© public domain

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