Suchergebnisse

This note deals with an experience in teaching one course in Principles of Economics at South Central Community College in New Haven, Connecticut. An attempt to radicalize the pedagogy and the content, utilizing Friere's techiques, was resisted by the students, all working class people. The conclusions drawn are: (1) working class stu dents face a contradiction that is not part of the experience of bourgeois students — altering approaches and conditions (even in courses) carry real risks; and (2) praxis and pedagogy must be differentiated along class lines of both the students and instructor.

I joined URPE when it was first formed in 1968 and found a strong support group in the Springfield-Northampton-Amherst area of Western Massachusetts when I got my first teaching job. I was at a teaching institution where the Economics program mostly serviced students from the School of Business. Having a support group of like-minded radicals in the early 1970s gave me the confidence and support to develop my own approach to teaching that combined presenting mainstream analysis and making all students aware of the existence and substance of radical alternatives. Those early years of URPE were a heady time—we were involved in struggles to make sure radicals were not purged by hostile departments. We attended conferences and wrote articles and participated in local struggles. Most importantly, unlike, for example, Paul Baran at Stanford University who lamented in a letter to Paul Sweezy that he had "no one to talk to," we had each other—we had the Review of Radical Political Economics ( RRPE)—and we had visions of changing not just economics but the world. We still need that hope and enthusiasm today.

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century has focused attention on the dramatic rise in economic inequality that has occurred in the United States and Europe over the past four decades. This paper argues that his account of the mechanisms that determine the distribution of income and wealth in a capitalist economy is unconvincing, for it rests on a tautology and on a spurious hypothesis about how the savings rate, the growth rate, and the capital/income ratio are connected.

In this essay, I argue that radical economics innovated in the communication of economic ideas, engendering new idioms and print formats to intervene in circuits of progressive activism. The essay mentions the pamphlet work of the Union for Radical Political Economics' various public engagement projects of the early 1970s but at its heart is the 1974 founding of the mass distribution monthly Dollars & Sense. It looks at the positions taken by the periodical over the years and asks, "What kind of print object was it?" It places the publication within a twentieth century history of left political economy periodicals and compares it with its closest contemporaries in the cultures of print of the American Left, notably Monthly Review and Radical America. The attention to the print ventures of radical economics in the 1970s is a contribution to a new kind of historiography that takes an expanded and extra-curricular outlook of economics.

The article uncovers and reconstructs the emergence of radical economics in postwar America, starting with the impact of McCarthyism on economics and the teaching of Marxism through the emergence of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) in 1968. In addition, the issue of the historical identity of radical economists is addressed in the article through its narrative that reenacts its development from McCarthyism to the emergence of URPE.