Welcome again, to a novel and fully-fledged issue...

Welcome again, to a novel and fully-fledged issue of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter. While you will find a whole armada of announcements on recently published books, calls for papers, noteworthy events and summer schools below, I wanted to point you to two important “calls for support”, which have been included in this issue of the Newsletter. The first relates to a crowdfounding-project advanced by Rod O’Donnell, which aims for financing the editorial screening and successive publication of John Maynard Keynes’ hitherto unpublished writings. Since I am a big fan of the 1973 Royal Economic Society edition of Keynes’ collected works (see here), I was, admittedly, surprised to learn that there is still so many unpublished material - according to Rod the RES-edition of 1973 does not even cover half of the relevant texts (although it does already cover a lot of interesting stuff, indeed). The second “call for support” relates to the more general issue of academic funding and aims to oppose the cutbacks currently threatening the academic sector in Argentina. So, in case you are overwhelmed with the material included in this issue you could simply start by donating / supporting said projects before working yourself through the rest of the material ;-)

Also, I wanted to share with you a minor observation: I have the impression that in the face of on-going economic fragility, more and more people start asking for possible fundamental deficiences in our basic economic setup, which brings issues of trade and global economic integration back on the table. Just drawing on my personal experience, I found that my tiny research output in international trade and global economic integration (about three noteworthy papers), attracted as many media requests/mentionings (e.g. this paper in the Financial Times), lecture invitations and political attention as the major bulk of my other works in the last six months. One more instance is documented below, and relates to the German version of this paper, which now received a prize issued by social-democratic policy-makers to honor the intellectual heritage of the famous Austrian heterodox economist Kurt W. Rothschild. Again, Rothschild was well-known for his skepticism against unconditional economic openness. Of course, this is largely anecdotal and not based on any systematic observation of public discourse. But, I would say it’s a save bet that issues of international trade and globalized finance will stay with us for much longer - and I have the feeling that some novel answers and perspectives on these issues might be increasingly in demand in the times to come.

I hope I am right and leave it at that,

all the best,

Jakob