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on Post Keynesian Economics |
| By: | Stephane Hlaimi (Department of Economics, University of Exeter); John Maloney (Department of Economics, University of Exeter) |
| Abstract: | The rapid diffusion of generative artificial intelligence in higher education is reshaping not only assessment practices but the epistemic and normative foundations of disciplinary knowledge. In economics education, where the distinction between positive analysis and normative judgment has long structured curricula, algorithmic systems risk amplifying theoretical monocultures, obscuring value assumptions, and privileging procedural fluency over critical reflection. This article argues that AI is not a neutral pedagogical tool but a sociotechnical infrastructure embedded in corporate power, data regimes, and the broader political economy of AI. The paper addresses three questions: How does algorithmic power reconfigure the moral architecture of economics education? Can AI strengthen rather than narrow pluralist inquiry? What institutional conditions are required for coherent and sustainable integration? Drawing on pluralist and heterodox economics, philosophy of economics, critical scholarship on the political economy of AI, and empirical research in economics education and assessment, the article develops a Moral-AI Pedagogy Framework embedding normative transparency, structured pluralism, critical AI literacy, and assessment reform centred on justificatory reasoning. Extending beyond classroom design, the analysis examines curriculum governance, faculty incentives, and digital procurement. When calculation accelerates, the cultivation of moral judgment becomes more, not less, essential. |
| Keywords: | economics education, political economy of AI, algorithmic power, pluralism in economics, moral judgment, heterodox economics, higher education governance, assessment reform |
| JEL: | A22 A13 B41 P16 I23 |
| Date: | 2026–05–14 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:exe:wpaper:2605 |
| By: | Discanno, Francesco |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the persistence of trade unions in European banking despite sustained declines in membership density, falling labour-capital ratios, and increasing financialisation of the sector. While existing research consistently documents long-term decline in the unionisation rate across advanced economies, it offers limited understanding of how unions continue to exert influence in highly financialised and technologically transformed industries such as banking, where traditional foundations of collective organisation have been significantly weakened. Addressing this gap, the paper develops an institutionalist framework that shifts analytical attention from membership density to institutional embeddedness within governance and bargaining structures. It argues that union influence in European banking is not primarily determined by membership base but by the degree of structural integration into sectoral bargaining systems, organisational routines, and procedural rights integrated in restructuring processes. Within this configuration, unions operate as intermediary actors that buffer adjustment pressures, enable coordination, and shape the implementation of organisational change. The main hypothesis is that union persistence in European banking is explained primarily by institutional embeddedness rather than membership density, and that integrated unions function as stabilising actors within financialised organisational environments. An auxiliary hypothesis proposes that declining labour-capital ratios increase the functional relevance of unions by intensifying coordination challenges and raising demand for procedural mechanisms of restructuring and employment adjustment. Methodologically, the study adopts a multi-layered mixed-methods design combining quantitative sectoral indicators—union density, employment trends, banking assets, and labour–capital ratios— with qualitative evidence drawn from comparative analysis of collective bargaining systems, country case studies, semi-structured interviews, and survey data. This design enables a structured multi-level analysis linking macro-structural financialisation dynamics with meso-institutional arrangements and micro-organisational processes. The paper contributes to three strands of literature. First, it challenges density-centred accounts of union decline by demonstrating that organisational erosion does not necessarily imply institutional marginalisation. Second, it extends research on financialisation by showing how structural transformation in banking coexists with persistent forms of procedural labour inclusion. Third, it contributes to comparative political economy by conceptualising unions as embedded institutions that enhance coordination and systemic stability in financialised capitalism. Overall, the findings show that union power in European banking is not disappearing but being reconfigured through institutional integration within contemporary governance structures, producing a systematic decoupling between organisational size and institutional influence. |
| Keywords: | Trade unions; European banking; institutional embeddedness; financialisation; collective bargaining; labour–capital ratio; industrial relations; governance; systemic stability; decoupling |
| JEL: | G21 J30 J51 J52 P16 |
| Date: | 2026–05–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129025 |
| By: | Giovanni Scarano |
| Abstract: | The paper advances novel interpretations of Marx’s original insights by situating them within the horizon of contemporary scientific approaches, notably dynamical systems theory and statistical physics. Marx’s dialectical method is a mode of analysis predicated on the insight that relations among parts cannot be adequately grasped in abstraction from the relation between the whole and its constituent elements – a defining feature of modern systemic approaches. This perspective renders it possible to reinterpret many of Marx’s key concepts as emergent properties of economic systems. The paper further contends that Marx conceived capitalist development as an intrinsically dynamic process that precludes the notion of equilibrium as a state of rest. In this light, the centrality of disequilibrium within the Marxian framework brings it into an alignment with contemporary theories of deterministic chaos, wherein systems persistently far from equilibrium are nonetheless amenable to rational analysis through the concept of attractors. |
| Keywords: | Complex systems, holism, reductionism, structuralism, disequilibrium |
| JEL: | A11 A12 B14 B40 B41 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rtr:wpaper:0292 |
| By: | Hanappi, Hardy |
| Abstract: | Since the 16th century, several forms of the capitalist mode of production have shaped the evolution of the human species. Any closer inspection of the concept of evolution reveals that it is a name for a dynamic, which incorporates several underlying contradictions. Seen from a larger perspective, a unifying characteristic of the evolution of capitalism is necessary to justify the use of a common name for this time period. But parallel to this necessity, partly contradicting it, a set of shorter stages of capitalism is needed to understand how the long-run phenomena could emerge at all. During each of these stages, some well-working mechanisms can be identified, which first led to a surge of this stage; and later, due to their working, these same mechanisms led to a partial collapse of the stage. In these shorter revolutionary intermezzi that often took several decades, new mechanisms were entering social evolution to maintain capitalism’s basic thrust and, at the same time, to overcome the obstacles of the previous stage. There clearly is a kind of fractal structure in such a historical treatment of capitalism’s evolution: Within each stage of capitalism, mid-range pulsations, sometimes called business cycles, can be observed which resemble the characteristics of the stage within which they are embedded. Of course, capitalism is a broad social formation and cannot be reduced to a simple core of stylised economic behaviour in the fashion of ‘achieving the highest output with scarce resources’. It extends to geopolitical power constellations as well as to cultural traits of capitalism’s stages. Capitalism, in its long-run evolution, in its historical mission, brought about mainly two achievements: A tremendous increase in labour productivity and a more and more sophisticated design for a global democratic institutional framework guiding the species into the next, non-capitalist mode of production. Evolutionary and institutional economics are the sub-disciplines of political economy that traditionally assembled research in this area. And the consideration of the stages of capitalism is the place where the inner workings of the dialectics of continuity and break can be best investigated. |
| Keywords: | Stages of Capitalism |
| JEL: | B51 B52 |
| Date: | 2026–05–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129013 |
| By: | Claudius Gräbner-Radkowitsch (Department of Plural Economics, Europe University Flensburg, Germany; Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria) |
| Abstract: | This chapter examines the coexistence of scholarly and advocacy “registers” within the pluralism-in-economics (PiE) movement and argues that distinguishing between them is both philosophically defensible and strategically necessary. The movement combines academic debates on pluralism, methodology, and epistemology with activist efforts aimed at institutional reform in economics. This dual structure creates two central challenges. The first, termed structural entanglement, refers to the unavoidable intertwining of epistemic and normative arguments in a policy-relevant discipline where the same actors move between scholarly and political roles. The second, epistemic capture, occurs when the authority of scholarly discourse is used to legitimize conclusions whose warrant is primarily normative. Rejecting both positivist claims of value-free science and relativist attempts to collapse the fact-value distinction, the chapter defends a middle position inspired by Veblen, Myrdal, feminist standpoint theory, and perspectival realism. This approach acknowledges the inevitability of value-ladenness in inquiry while maintaining the possibility of evaluating claims according to epistemic standards. Building on this framework, the chapter proposes a “perspectival adequacy assessment” based on procedural openness to criticism and cross-perspectival comparison. Empirically, the chapter discusses examples of blurred scholarly and advocacy functions within and around the PiE movement. As a constructive response, it advocates “register transparency” and a division of labor between scholarly and advocacy functions. The chapter concludes that preserving a distinction between epistemic and normative warrant is essential for maintaining the analytical credibility and transformative potential of pluralist economics. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ico:wpaper:181 |
| By: | Johan Albrecht (-) |
| Abstract: | Europe's €1.2 trillion grid investment challenge by 2040 is commonly framed as a financial challenge. This paper argues that the central obstacle is institutional: Europe's hybrid liberalization model generates a structural mismatch between energy system transformation ambitions and governance capacity. Drawing on political economy and infrastructure governance theory, this paper develops an integrated governance framework identifying four interconnected failures rooted in the institutional incompatibility between the liberalization paradigm and the coordination requirements of the energy transition. First, we face a liberalization paradox as fixed market outcomes are increasingly imposed on free market platforms, while four competing design logics — geoeconomic, capitalist, ecological, and social-integrative — operate without any hierarchical guidance. Second, permitting bottlenecks reflect not bureaucratic inefficiency but decades of accumulated democratic preferences, requiring a new theory of necessary infrastructure. Third, flexibility governance misframes behavioral adaptation as techno-economic optimization, undermining civic legitimacy at scale. Fourth, grid congestion forces grid operators or regulators into reactive industrial policy decisions without democratic mandate. These failures compound in the financing dimension: incentive misalignments, fiscal deterioration, and fragmented EU instruments produce reactive and inadequate investment. The framework demonstrates that technical and financial interventions — however substantial — cannot substitute for the institutional reconstruction that transformation requires. As European coordination emerges as a precondition for grid development, the paper raises the fundamental question of whether the era of market liberalization is giving way to a new era of system planning. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rug:rugwps:26/1142 |
| By: | Tomasz Kopczewski (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences) |
| Abstract: | This paper documents and formalises the Know Thyself method, a teaching approach developed through more than thirty years of university teaching practice. Its starting diagnosis is that students often learn economic models without experiencing the assumptions that make those models necessary. The method reverses the usual sequence: experience before theory, data as a mirror before abstraction, and questions before answers. Its empirical core is not the experiment narrowly understood, but ad hoc research: classroom experiments, surveys, simulations, valuation tasks, and replication laboratories that make learners’ own assumptions visible. Four case studies — expected value, ergodicity, market equilibrium, and the rationality of altruism — illustrate how the method converts declarative knowledge into reflective practice. Artificial intelligence gives the method scale by lowering the cost of surveys, dashboards, simulations, and replication protocols. The paper’s practical conclusion is simple: change the order. Ask first. Teach later. |
| Keywords: | economics education, epistemic provocation, experiential learning, replication, expected value, ergodicity, market equilibrium, AI in education, science curiosity |
| JEL: | A22 B41 C92 D81 D83 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:war:wpaper:2026-14 |