The Corona-pandemic still has a visible impact on...
The Corona-pandemic still has a visible impact on the contents of this Newsletter: we have much less Calls for Papers to feature than usual and, if so, these calls typically relate to Special Issues or online meetings. In short, nobody seems to be eager to plan any offline events and I do fully understand that. Maybe the scientific communities around the globe can reap a take-away from this by learning how to substitute physical gatherings with online meetings, which would also serve to reduce our carbon footprint. To compensate a little for the decrease in Calls for Papers and to further facilitate the use of online activities in heterodox economics I have tried to expand our coverage of podcasts and webinars during the last issues.
Furthermore, we also witnessed a slight surge in petitions – and, indeed, the question of how a post-Corona stimulus should be implemented is a major question in the political arena and has, at least in Europe, already led to slight changes of long-standing pro-austerity positions among several countries. Personally, I would be eager to go beyond “rebuilding the old”, but rather devote any post-Corona stimulus to also address other major future challenges, like socio-economic inequality or climate change. However, in this issue I have included a petition on “Democratizing Work” that goes even beyond that by suggesting to fundamentally recast our societal understanding of work as a response to the Corona crisis. This petition has been quite effective in terms of global media coverage. It has a strong Polanyian flavor as it is directed against the commodification of work (and humans in general), which relates nicely to a series of existing works in heterodox economics (see, e.g., here or here).
All the best,
Jakob
PS: In preceding issues I have repeatedly announced the advent of a new heterodox journal – the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy sponsored by EAEPE. I am happy to inform you that the first articles of the inaugural issue have now been published on the journal’s website. All details on this can be found here.