The Heterodox Economics Newsletter regularly covers the Table...
The Heterodox Economics Newsletter regularly covers the Table of Contents of various journals open to heterodox ideas. If you want to lose an hour or two I invite you to browse carefully through the respective section of the Newsletter – at least I always lose that much time when editing this section ;-). My personal favorite in this issue is, by the way, the special section on “Evolutionary Perspectives on Economic Policy” in the recent issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics.
Nonetheless, many fascinating papers appear outside the narrow spectrum we are able to cover and, also, some cool papers appear at unusual places. Here I wanted to share four such papers I have recently discovered. Two of those are by Robert C. Allen and deal with a ‘needs-based’ appraoch towards assessing poverty, which in my view is interesting for three reasons: first, it aims to operationalize the classic ‘needs-wants’ distinction in a pragmatic way. Second, it is an approach that allows for easier comparisons of societies across time & space because it operates on clearly identifiable material categories. Finally, it builds on already existing data. In his two papers, Allen projects this on the question of world poverty and the associated infamous ‘absolute poverty line’ of 1.90$ and on the issue of historical poverty rates, which indicates that (a) historical poverty rates since the 18th century were often surprisingly low (partially below 10%) and (b) that high absolute poverty in many developing countries should be seen as a colonial legacy (see also this neat summary on Allen’s second paper).
Another inspiring paper related to a needs-based approach is located in Nature Sustainability (which acutally features quite a lot of heterodox content); it probably represents the most-up-to-date evaluation of how countries do in a doughnut-like-framework. Usually this literature reaches devastating results as no country is able ‘to do well within limits’, which illustrates the somehwat obvious, namely that some large-scale change is needed in how we organize our provisioning processes.
This brings me to my final paper published by The Lancet — Health Longevity(fancy, isn’t it ;-)), which explicates this question – how to best organize our provisioning systems – by focusing on the care sector. It claims that market-based provisioning systems do systematically worse than alternative organisational forms, which resonates very well with my intuition that not all goods & service are alike, but, indeed, quite heterogenous and often tied to very subtle qualities and characteristics. And, indeed, a closer reflection of the question which goods & services should be supplied by what kind of provisioning system could be again tied to a needs-based approach to get a better empirical grip on the beforementioned heterogeneities and subtleties. Such a rethinking could induce the kind of “change in the habits of thought” that, according to some wise men, always accompanies “all economic change”.*
All the best,
Jakob
- This is a Veblen-quote, see here.
PS: I have recently also published a paper far from the beaten (heterodox) paths. You can check it out here, in case you are interest in estimating wealth distributions. But take care: it is only downloadable for a few days from now…
PPS: An interesting book providing some economic contextualization to the current war in Ukraine is also listed below (see here for a quicklink).