This is the 301st issue of the Heterodox...

This is the 301st issue of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter. It was a long journey from the early years – the Newsletter was founded as a formal service in September 2004 by the late Frederic S. Lee – to today and I will make use of this occasion to contemplate a little on the Newsletter’s history.

Actually, browsing back to early issues is fun. For instance, the first issue featured a Call for Papers on ”Radical Economics and the Labor Movement“, an invitation to a somewhat prescient public talk by Paul Davidson titled ”Coping with threatening financial crises and international debt defaults“, a note on a book by Kevin Gallagher on ”Free Trade and the Environment“ and a full section(!) on ”Papers in Progress“. While the latter feature indicates some change (as the Newsletter does not cover working papers regularly anymore), the topics and questions addressed show greater continuity, probably because they all remain unsolved on a practical/political level today ;-)

Fun aside, it seems worth mentioning that a lot of people have contributed to the Newsletter over the past decades. While Fred Lee, who is greatly missed for his passion and wisdom, played a crucial role in creating the Newsletter, editorship after a few years passed to Tae-Hee Jo and Ted Schmidt, who did a tremendous job in expanding the reach of the Newsletter in terms of coverage and subscribers before I took over. Many thanks do not only go to past editors but to all the students, assistants and sometimes simply friends, who helped keep this service and the underlying spirit alive and well over the years. In this context, praise goes to Florian Springholz, Timo Kapelari, Niklas Klann, Johanna Rath, Daniela Cialfi, Erik Dean, Alexander Cruz and Alam Galicia-Robles for their always reliable and passionate work on this small scientific community service.

Needless to add that the Newsletter has also seen support from various academic institutions (like SUNY Buffalo State, University of Duisburg-Essen or Johannes Kepler University Linz) as well as those individuals that provide crucial inputs that inform us of errors spotted in our announcements or that donate to us to support our efforts.

My final thanks go to all those fine people who work hard to bring heterodox economics into the 21st century, to update it to new challenges, and to apply it sensibly to solve current societal problems. And, incidentally, this issue bears testimony to these efforts by featuring a truck-load of recent journal issues and books. Especially, this issue’s section on recent books is exemplary for what I mean here. It contains many contributions asking for critical junctures in the development of currently established systems of economic provisioning focusing on a variety of perspectives, including the reform of capitalism, the possibility of deliberate as well as catastrophic shifts to alternative provisioning systems, and the rise and decline of social divisions across the classical categories of race, class and gender.

Many thanks and all the best,

Jakob