Check out these selected sources for an introduction to the ideas about the role of the state and markets in the context of the economic challenges for the 21st century - inequality, growth, climate change and automation.
Short videos
Technical reports
Books
Short videos
Christian Falk, 1993 Singapore, A success story
A film about the economic success story of Singapore. Produced in 1993. A 28 min. documentary that shows Singapore in the early 1990's. Several interesting interviews with different backgrounds mixed with documentary footage.
Hoover institute, 2010 Milton Friedman : take it to the limits
An interview with Milton Friedman 2010 explaining his ideas about free market capitalism “Libertarianism”.
Thomas Picketty, 2014 New thoughts on capital in the 21st century
French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality: r is greater than g (meaning that return on capital is generally higher than economic growth). Here, he talks through the massive data set that led him to conclude: Economic inequality is not new, but it is getting worse, with radical possible impacts.
Dan Airley, 2011 What is behavioral economics
Dan explains an overview of the field Behavioral economics, which looks at economics without the neoclassical assumption that humans are rational, and instead looks at how they actually behave.
Kate Pickett, 2010 The consequence of inequality and wealth distribution
Kate Pickett summary of the research of the costs of inequality and relative incomes vs absolute aggregate income at the national level.
Tim Jackson, 2010 An economic reality check
As the world faces recession, climate change, inequity and more, Tim Jackson delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles, explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future.
Mariana Mazzucato, 2013 Government - investor, risk-taker, innovator
Why doesn't the government just get out of the way and let the private sector -- the "real revolutionaries" -- innovate? It's rhetoric you hear everywhere, and Mariana Mazzucato wants to dispel it. In an energetic talk, she shows how the state -- which many see as a slow, hunkering behemoth -- is really one of our most exciting risk-takers and market-shapers.
Jeremy Rifkin, 2018 Third industrial revolution
The global economy is in crisis. The exponential exhaustion of natural resources, declining productivity, slow growth, rising unemployment, and steep inequality, forces us to rethink our economic models. Where do we go from here? In this feature-length documentary, social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin lays out a road map to usher in a new economic system.
Crashcourse, 2015 Fiscal policy and stimulus
A heavily debated topic in economics - fiscal stimulus, a way for governments to use taxes and spending influence the economy
Economics explained, 2020 Economy of Sweden
Overview of the modern economy of Sweden
Economics explained, 2020 Economy of Singapore
History of the economy of Singapore
Technical reports
World Bank, 2010, Washington Consensus : Assessing a damaged brand
The Washington consensus was a set of free market policies from 1980-1990’s promoted by the IMF, World Bank for developing countries that in retrospect failed to produce the growth that they advertised.
Schettkat, 1999, Small economy macroeconomics: The economic success of Ireland, Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands compared
Economic comparison of open market economies - Scandanavian welfare-state countries vs US and others in Europe on growth, inflation, wages and other performance measure
Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry, 1986, The Singapore economy, new directions
Economic Commission root cause investigation and policy response report to the 1985 recession.
Menon, Ravi, 2015 An economic history of Singapore 1965-2065 Short review of Singapore’s economic development history and projection into the future from a pro-establishment author Chia, Siow Yue
Two in-depth reports by the same author on Singapore economy in high profile topics - foreign immigration and transition to services/knowledge economic model
Singapore Ministry of Finance, 2015, income growth, distribution and mobility trends in SingaporeInequality trends in Singapore and policy responses
International Monetary Fund, 2020, Countering Future Recessions in Advanced Economies: Cyclical Policies in an Era of Low Rates and High Debt
More than a decade after the global financial crisis, the world is struggling with the health and economic effects of a profound new crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Advanced economies entered this crisis with interest rates at historical lows and public debts, on average, higher than they had been over the past 60 years. They will come out from the crisis with even higher public debts. To ensure a prompt and effective response to adverse shocks in such conditions, policymakers should consider increasing the sensitivity of traditional automatic stabilizers and adopting rules-based fiscal stimulus measures.
Jackson, Tim, 2017, Prosperity without growth
By arguing that "prosperity – in any meaningful sense of the word – transcends material concerns", the report summarizes the evidence showing that, beyond a certain point, growth does not increase human well-being. Prosperity without Growth analyses the complex relationships between economic growth, environmental crises and social recession. It proposes a route to a sustainable economy, and argues for a redefinition of "prosperity" in light of the evidence on what really contributes to people’s well-being
Krugman, Paul, 1997, the myth of Asian’s miracle
An influential article critical of Singapore’s post independence economic development. Krugman argues that much of Singapore’s economic growth can be attributed to “factor accumulation” of immigration, foreign direct investment and in contrast total factor productivity has not outperformed but rather lagged its peers
Hardin, Garret, 1968, Tragedy of the Commons
A short essay to communicate a model of collective action failure due to perverse incentives that conflict between interest of self and the collective using the metaphor of grazing commons
Barro, Robert, 1990, government spending in a simple model of endogenous growth
An “endogenous” model of economic growth which doesn’t rely on either technology or population growth based on the reinvestment of tax revenues back into the economy by the state and also explains the observed under-predicted growth of low income countries on differences in human capital formation.
Grossman, Krueger, 1991, Environmental impact of NAFTA
The original “Environmental Kuznets Curve” argument based on empirical observation of SOx emissions vs GDP per capita, with theoretical explanation that technology is a driver for environmental conservation
IPPR Commission on Economic Justice, 2017 Managing Automation Employment, inequality and ethics in the digital age
A UK based report investigating the impact of automation on economic development finds that work will be transformed by automation, not eliminated. Aggregate effects on employment are likely to offset negative sectoral impacts. Automation is likely to change the composition of the tasks that people perform. Polarisation between ‘lovely’ jobs and ‘lousy’ jobs is a serious risk.
Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), 2015 The Global Trade Slowdown: A New Normal
Report on the past and prospects of future trade growth
Books
Robert Sapolsky, 2017 Behave : The biology of humans at our best and our worst Neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky explores how the brain causes human behavior from the synapse of neurons to emergence of cultures and political parties
Geoffrey West, 2017 Scale : The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
Geoffrey West, a physicist from the field of complexity science applies the science of emergent systems and networks to organisms, cities and companies. He found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. This investigation has led to insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The book makes it possible to envision how cities, companies and biological life alike.
Core Economics, 2014 Economics
An online textbook for introductory Economics
Raworth, Kate, 2017 Doughnut Economics
The environmental ceiling consists of nine planetary boundaries, as set out by Rockstrom et al, beyond which lie unacceptable environmental degradation and potential tipping points in Earth systems. The twelve dimensions of the social foundation are derived from internationally agreed minimum social standards, as identified by the world’s governments in the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Between social and planetary boundaries lies an environmentally safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive.
Easley, David, 2010, Networks, crowds and markets
Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.
Elinor Ostrom, 1990, Governing the commons
The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems.
Thomas Picketty, 2013, Capital in the 21st century
Historical accounting of capital, wealth and inequality and a theoretical explanation based on the difference between returns to capital r and aggregate economic growth rate g
Marianna Mazzucato, 2011, The entrepreneurial state
According to conventional wisdom, innovation is best left to the dynamic entrepreneurs of the private sector, and the government should get out of the way. But what if all this was wrong? Mazzucato is argues that the state has played a central role in producing game-changing breakthroughs'
John Maynard Keynes, 1936, General theory of employment, interest, and money
Keynes first published this book in 1936 during the financial depression (1929-1940) that had world wide effects. The ideas presented at that time are applicable to the present income disparity seen today. It should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in our present economic situation.
Daniel Steadman Jones, 2014, Masters of the universe : the birth of neoliberal politics
Traces the ascendancy of neoliberalism from the academy of interwar Europe to supremacy under Reagan and Thatcher and in the decades since. Daniel Stedman Jones argues that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of free-market politics. Far from being the story of the simple triumph of right-wing ideas, the neoliberal breakthrough was contingent on the economic crises of the 1970s and the acceptance of the need for new policies by the political left.
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