June 3, 2018

Economic Theory for the Anthropocene

Towards heterodox understandings of sustainable economies

Interdisciplinary workshop with Dr Ioana Negru and Dr Gaël Giraud
Guildford, University of Surrey, 3 July 2018

The event has now passed. Please find a summary by Henry Leveson-Gower on The Mint Magazine website.

In the 10 years since the financial crisis, heterodox theories of the economy have flourished. With an interdisciplinary outlook, they offer a much richer potential path towards sustainable economies than orthodox economics alone. But, to date, most research into the relationship between the environment and the economy has been undertaken through the narrow lens of orthodox economics. Consequently, the question of what a sustainable economy might look like remains largely unanswered.

On 3 July 2018, as part of a workshop that aims to fill this gap, CUSP and the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Surrey are pleased to invite you to two talks by leading economists in the field.

13:10 | On Coherency, Schools of Thought and Sustainability,

Ioana Negru, SOAS, University of London
Dr Ioana Negru is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Her research interests include economic pluralism, economic philosophy and methodology, and ecological economics.

Ioana’s presentation will look into various schools of economic thought and their message on sustainability in order to debate the question of whether the literature on sustainability is coherent. Ioana will also pose the question of whether there is a strategic need for integration of various schools of thought in order to form a stronger alternative to the mainstream economic conception of sustainability.

17:00 | Global warming, Thermodynamics and Stock-flow consistent Macro-dynamics,

Gaël Giraud, French Development Agency
Dr Gaël Giraud is Chief Economist and Executive Director of the Innovation, Research and Knowledge Directorate of the Agence Française de Développement. His research interests include alternative measures of development, general equilibrium theory, game theory, and financing and energy issues.

Gaël’s presentation will present the state of art of his latest research on the fundamental issues of how global warming might impact the world economy, and the tools we might use to improve planetary, economic, and financial resilience. In particular, he will provide a new macro framework that is fully compatible with the first two laws of thermodynamics. This framework. The framework is based on stock-flow consistent non-linear dynamics with a climate back-loop. This framework is used to explore the interplay between private debt dynamics and climate change as a coupled source of Minskyan instability, and how debt-deflationary collapse might be avoided through to a number of public policies.