Law of Economics 5: We are History Maker

by Jan Frederik Moos

Let me start with a few personal remarks. My goal has always been to provide policy advice that is both realistic and relevant. That’s why I try to stay close to current historical developments. I’ve long had a personal interest in green politics, but in today’s Europe, rising living costs and unemployment have shifted political priorities.

For that reason, my current work doesn’t focus on environmental issues as much as I would like — sometimes, the needs of society have to come before personal preferences. Otherwise, you’ll face the consequences at the elections. Stabilising the situation through the implementation of the first four chapters — summarised below as a brief policy recommendation — would once again pave the way for functional politics.

(1)   Strengthening the social system: higher social benefits and an increased minimum wage to ensure that a fair share of national income flows to wages and that wages rise in line with productivity. When workers become more productive, their wages should — and must — rise accordingly.

(2)   Household and corporate savings show the real scope for government deficits. Stop the austerity and the moralising — invest public money in public goods and social progress.

(3)   Inflation stems from wages growing faster than productivity, not from money. The central bank’s job is not to fight inflation but to keep interest rates low and support productive investment.

(4)   Money arises from debt, and public debt — the private sector’s net financial wealth — is never truly repaid. There is no generational conflict: saving for future generations requires the state to issue additional government bonds.

Now I’d like to tell you a bit about my journey. I completed a bachelor’s in business administration and then a master’s in pluralist economics, believing it would prepare the experts of tomorrow. Unfortunately, the reality was different. In Siegen, pluralist economics remains heavily influenced by neoliberal ideas. The Austrian School, for instance, plays a major role there, yet it is, at its core, more a form of wishful philosophy than a basis for serious macroeconomic policy.

The programme was also overloaded, with constant assignments and little room for deeper reflection. Yet that is exactly what is needed — to understand a few key concepts in depth rather than having a superficial grasp of everything. Without that, responsible policy advice becomes impossible. I completed my degree in just three semesters in order to begin developing my own projects independently. In short, the programme did not help me refine my macroeconomic focus, which I still find regrettable.

This project has become the very realisation of what I once sought to perfect. Completing it here in the United Kingdom feels deeply fitting: a German who had never left his home country for more than two weeks is now completing his first major economic work in the land of Joan Robinson and John Maynard Keynes. With your support, further projects can follow — possibly covering the international dimension or the seven foundations of MMT. You can support my work via PayPal:https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=3CDJZF82THQG8

What often goes unnoticed is how much time, care, and responsibility it takes to truly master even those four fundamental areas. It’s not about vaguely recalling what Keynes once said after two cups of coffee — it’s about clearly explaining why permanent government deficits are economically necessary. Wake me up at three in the morning, and I’ll still explain economics without stumbling.

On a more personal note, I could have worked as a memory trainer and might show you some of my techniques at some point. That’s useful even as an economist. It would probably pay better, too. I’m known as a “human calendar” because I can calculate the weekday for any date in my head — one of the simplest tricks, but the one that usually gets the best reaction. But I prefer being a rigorous scholar to being a showman.

Still, I chose macroeconomics because I find more fulfilment in contributing to the public good than in maximising my income. I’m the kind of scholar who values scientific precision over my personal income, which isn’t always easy when working independently. I also want the world to understand macroeconomics — that’s why everything is freely accessible and the project is donation-based rather than hidden behind a paywall.

Now that we’ve covered the personal background, let’s turn to methodology — in other words, why modern economics so often fails to answer real-world questions. Take a look at the following quote and try to identify what state of the world mainstream economists assume to be “normal”:

"The foundations of modern macroeconomics were laid when Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu proved that under perfect competition, markets would always clear and reach equilibrium. It was a triumph of pure mathematics. But in the process, unemployment, money, power, and institutions vanished from the picture." (Keynes, T. 2025).

The quote illustrates that mainstream economists want us to believe that a market consisting solely of buyers and sellers will always reach equilibrium. We are discussing this because, in this chapter, our focus is on methodology. Mainstream economists construct their model as a kind of "normal state of the world", in which everything functions perfectly. The agents — that is, buyers and sellers — each behave in a purely economically rational way at the individual level, and this, in turn, is supposed to explain the behaviour of the market.

Take a look at the simplified diagram (Figure 1). "Under normal circumstances", the entire economy is expected to be in equilibrium — that is, at the point marked by the red cross. If the seller sets the price too high (as shown on the left), some goods will remain unsold because buyers are unwilling to pay that much. Conversely, if the price is set too low, demand will exceed supply, and some willing buyers will go away empty-handed. Through a series of bargaining processes and market adjustments, the market tends to move gradually towards an equilibrium price. The conclusion proceeds as follows: individuals act rationally → individual markets are cleared as a result → the entire economy has a clearing point. The methodology is therefore fundamentally deductive (deductive means reasoning from individuals to the whole — assuming that what holds for individuals holds for the economy).

Figure 1: Excess demand model (own graphic)

At its core, this so-called “general equilibrium model” seeks to explain how a system of markets clears — once goods have already been produced — through the mutual adjustment of supply and demand (Lavoie, M. 2022: 54-55). The object of analysis — an economy of simplified, quasi-medieval markets without internal or external disturbances, in which all goods have already been produced — is a purely logical construct and already irrelevant at this stage (Flassbeck, H. 2024: 107).

In addition, the model rests on a set of highly unrealistic assumptions: all agents are perfectly rational and perfectly informed, information is costless, and auctioneers operate in every market. Furthermore, all economic agents are assumed to be identical — an assumption introduced later in response to mathematical difficulties, known as the representative agent, and associated with the impossibility theorem.

Overall, the general equilibrium model can be described as a closed system (a closed system is a world without real change or openness – everything follows a set of fixed rules)  because it assumes that all relevant variables and relationships are already known and remain stable over time. Within this framework, identical causes are expected to produce identical effects, and any deviation is treated merely as a temporary disturbance. The future is thus fully predetermined, and the behaviour of the economy is assumed to be logically deducible from the actions of individual rational agents.

In reality, however, the social world does not behave like a closed system. The economy is an open system: it is shaped by evolving institutions, changing preferences, and the continuous interplay of social relations. New decisions and innovations emerge every day, often in response to unforeseen circumstances. This openness makes it impossible to identify stable and universal economic laws through deductive reasoning. The agents within such a system are correlated; even minimal deviations in their behaviour can fundamentally alter the dynamics of the whole. Any attempt to model the economy as a closed system therefore abstracts from its very essence — its historicity, interdependence, and capacity for genuine novelty.

The deeper problem lies in what Lawson calls the epistemic fallacy — the belief that questions about what exists (ontology) can be reduced to questions about what we can know or measure (epistemology). Mainstream economics commits this fallacy by treating the world as if it were identical to the models it can formalize. If economists were to take ontology seriously — recognizing that the economy is an open and evolving system — they would have to abandon the deductivist ideal altogether. The real choice, as Lawson puts it, is between adherence to deductivism and engagement with reality. Only by choosing the latter can economics become a genuinely scientific discipline — one that investigates the mechanisms and structures that drive social change rather than presupposing their absence.

Methodology of Heterodox Economics (beta-version)

To understand post-Keynesian economics, we first need to look at how post-Keynesians think about the world and science itself — in other words, at their method. Their approach does not begin with mathematical models or universal laws, but with a set of assumptions about what kind of reality the economy belongs to. These assumptions, or presuppositions, shape how we study economic life: what counts as an explanation, what kinds of behaviour we consider realistic, and how we understand change over time.

The first presupposition is realism. Economic theory, in this view, should aim to explain real structures and causal mechanisms, not to simplify the world into a mathematical exercise. Abstraction is necessary, but it must remain anchored in reality. The economy is not a system of equations but a complex social process shaped by institutions, habits, and power relations. The goal is to understand why things happen, not merely to describe what would happen in an idealised world. This stands in contrast to the instrumentalist stance of mainstream economics, where a model can be considered useful even if its assumptions are false, as long as its predictions seem accurate. For post-Keynesians, a theory built on unreal assumptions cannot lead to genuine understanding.

From this realist foundation follows a different conception of human behaviour. If the economy is a real and changing system, then people cannot be treated as perfectly rational optimisers who know the true model of the world. post-Keynesian economics assumes instead that individuals act under uncertainty, using the information, norms, and institutions available to them. Their rationality is environment-consistent: it reflects the conditions in which they live and the limitations they face. People rely on conventions and expectations, not on mathematical optimisation. They aim for outcomes that are “good enough,” adapting their behaviour as the world around them changes.

Once we accept that decisions are made under uncertainty and shaped by social context, it follows that the economy must be seen as an interconnected whole. When individuals influence one another, even the slightest deviations in the behaviour of a few can be enough to throw the neoclassical model into complete disorder. Nothing can be meaningfully derived from the individual alone, and additional reasoning errors arise when conclusions about the whole are drawn from isolated cases — the so-called paradoxes. post-Keynesian economics is therefore holistic. It views the economy as a structured system whose properties cannot be reduced to individual choices. Institutions, social classes, and production structures interact in ways that generate outcomes no single actor intends. The paradox of thrift, for instance, shows that what is rational for one person—saving more—can be destructive for society as a whole when everyone does it at once. These emergent effects mean that macroeconomics cannot be built by simply adding up individual behaviour. The system as a whole has its own dynamics.

This systemic view changes how we understand what constrains the economy. In mainstream economics, scarcity is the central problem: limited resources must be allocated efficiently through prices. post-Keynesian economics reverses this logic. Modern economies are not limited by resources but by spending. The problem is not scarcity but underutilisation. Factories, labour, and capital often sit idle because demand is too weak. The key question is not how to allocate resources but how to make use of them. Output and employment depend on effective demand—on the willingness of firms and households to spend. The economy’s real challenge, therefore, lies in maintaining sufficient demand to use its productive potential.

Markets do not correct themselves because adjustments occur through changes in demand rather than through flexible prices. As reality shows, demand can remain chronically insufficient for decades, leading to persistent underemployment and unused capacity, as discussed in Chapter 2. If output and employment depend on demand, there is no automatic mechanism that pushes the economy back to full utilisation. The idea that unregulated markets naturally move towards equilibrium is therefore inconsistent with experience and therefore with reality. Capitalist economies are inherently unstable, shaped by credit cycles, shifting expectations, and profit motives. Lasting stability requires regulation, coordination, and deliberate collective action. post-Keynesian economics thus regards the state, trade unions, and financial institutions not as distortions of market forces but as essential components of a functioning economy. Public policy and social institutions provide the coordination and stability that markets alone cannot achieve; without them, capitalism tends to drift into instability, inequality, and unemployment.

This sixth presupposition is more controversial, and I will devote a separate section to it later. I, like several post-Keynesian economists such as Sheila Dow, Victoria Chick and Tony Lawson, regard capitalism as an open system — one in which we quite literally write the future through our decisions. This view has profound implications for how we understand the future (uncertainty) and for the extent to which human agency can shape economic outcomes, which I consider to be highly advantageous aspects of the Post-Keyesian framework and will discuss in greater detail below. The main difficulty, however, lies in drawing a clear boundary between this presupposition and the others. The notion of openness naturally follows from realism, environment-consistent rationality, holism, and demand-driven dynamics, so it is not always clear whether it should be treated as a distinct assumption or as the logical extension of the entire post-Keynesian worldview.

From these foundations arise the main areas of post-Keynesian analysis. The research objects also distinguish post-Keynesian economics from other heterodox schools of thought, such as Marxism, which shares its methodology (points 1–5) with the post-Keynesian approach.  The labour market is understood as a system of contracts and power relations rather than a simple price mechanism. Effective demand determines the level of output and employment. Inflation is explained as the result of distributional conflict and cost pressures, not an excess of money. The monetary system is seen as credit-driven and state-anchored, with money created endogenously through lending. And all of these processes operate under the shadow of an uncertain future, where expectations, not probabilities, guide decisions (more on that follows).

Taken together, these ideas define post-Keynesian economics as a realist, historically grounded, and institutionally aware approach to understanding capitalism. It views the economy as an open, demand-driven system whose stability depends on collective institutions and whose evolution is shaped by uncertainty and human interaction.

Economics of Open Systems – Why We Write History

The capitalist system must be understood as an open system — one in which history is continuously being written. Every day, there are unforeseen external influences. Every day, individuals make decisions that alter the world around them and are, in turn, shaped by the world around them. Because of this constant interaction, a deductive approach fails: as soon as one actor behaves differently from what deduction predicts, the entire system changes. Every actor influences others, directly or indirectly, meaning that the social realm is deeply interrelated and perpetually dynamic (Lawson, 2023).

We can observe this interdependence in many aspects of social life: language evolves, tastes in music and technology shift, and behavioural conventions adapt. Each generation writes its own distinct chapter of history. Economics, therefore, must analyse the social outcomes of its own time and explain them causally — for without causality, empirical observation risks amounting to mere coincidence (Lawson, T. 1997, p. 166). The approach pursued here therefore analyses the system as it behaves — that is, ontologically — rather than focusing on individual agents. It is empirically guided and seeks to identify logical relationships. We have done this successfully in the four preceding chapters.

The conclusion of this introduction is simple: We must capture reality somehow. This was also the method of Keynes, who sought to create images of reality in order to observe its problems and changes. As Victoria Chick explains, Keynes’s approach can be described as kaleidostatics — an attempt to freeze, for a moment, a continually shifting picture. Yet while a kaleidoscope changes randomly, Keynes’s method is more like a film: a moving picture composed of successive snapshots, each systematically related to what has gone before and foreshadowing what is to come. It is, in essence, a story full of flashbacks and flashes forward (Chick, V. 1983: 14).

In the first chapter, we examined wages at the macroeconomic, or systemic, level. Wages are not only the most important price in the economy but also its principal source of income and, consequently, the key driver of demand. Their evolution reflects an ongoing social conflict between trade unions and employers. Depending on which side gains the upper hand, the distribution of national income shifts — with a larger share flowing either to wages or to profits. It would be misleading to argue that a higher profit share is preferable, since this inevitably produces a shortfall in demand. Each generation, therefore, writes its own chapter of this conflict: at times, trade unions gain strength, as in the 1970s; at others, their influence recedes and entrepreneurs dominate. Our time is writing a history of trade unions that are tactically skilled but politically weakened. Their position within the class struggle must be strengthened once more, as is, for example, advocated by Germany’s Left Party. The focus here is on the social outcomes of these shifting power relations, while recognising the dual role of wages and maintaining that wage growth should be in line with productivity — thereby enabling the economy, in logical terms, to buy back its own output.

The second chapter explored the macroeconomic dimension of saving. In contemporary Germany, the private sector saves at exceptionally high levels, creating a persistent demand gap that renders government deficits structurally necessary. The system must therefore be analysed dynamically and with up-to-date data. Saving has been culturally elevated to a moral virtue, yet the extraordinarily high saving rates — roughly €290 billion annually by households and another €40 billion by corporations (Bundesbank 2025) — also arise from structural factors. Corporate tax reductions absorb less of these savings, while higher interest rates reduce new borrowing within the economy, for instance for housing investment. Given this complexity, we can only analyse the overall outcome and respond accordingly through public deficits, as these represent the logically necessary counterpart to the demand gap.

The third chapter examined how prices emerge within the economic system. Demand drives changes in output rather than in prices. Money is not neutral. Entrepreneurs do not incorporate the money supply into their pricing decisions. Instead, the most important price is the wage — the amount entrepreneurs pay per unit of output. Wage developments are therefore crucial for price dynamics, and we have already referred to the tactically skilled trade unions. Part of their strategy is to avoid taking risks that could lead to sustained inflation. This represents the current chapter in the history of the trade unions — their present snapshot. This perspective challenges conventional trade-offs such as the NAIRU (the concept holds that some unemployment is necessary to keep prices from rising too fast — well explained here) and locates the control of inflation where it truly belongs: in wage policy. The NAIRU concept emerged in a very different historical context, when trade unions were both much stronger and often less strategic, and is therefore largely irrelevant today. German trade unions still seek to secure an appropriate share of national income for wages — an ongoing tug of war — yet they would never risk triggering a wage–price spiral. Instead, they increasingly rely on one-off payments during periods of price shocks as a means of balancing wage demands with price stability. Full employment, therefore, poses no threat to price stability — contrary to what central banks often assume.

The fourth chapter turned to money itself. At the macroeconomic level, no financial asset can exist without a corresponding liability. Saving, therefore, presupposes the creation of debt: additional saving is only possible when new liabilities are created elsewhere in the system. When private economy attempt to save without proactive government borrowing, they pursue an impossibility — the economy inevitably contracts. Moreover, when households insist on saving under such conditions, government revenues fall, ensuring that deficits will emerge regardless. The real question is not whether deficits exist, but whether they are managed wisely or foolishly (this relationship is also referred to as the Wray Curve). Modern economics — and current politics alike — unfortunately tell the story of foolish deficits, not of wise ones, because this logical connection is not understood.

In the preceding chapters, particularly Chapters 1 and 2 — while Chapters 3 and 4 served mainly as technical clarifications — we linked our analysis to the production side of the economy, which is reactive and partly shaped by expectations. When the areas examined in Chapters 1 and 2 expand progressively, the production side responds with higher employment and greater output to meet the positive evolution of demand. When the economy enters a downturn, the opposite occurs: production contracts and firms respond with layoffs.

The distinction between the labour market and effective demand is therefore never entirely accurate, yet it remains a useful analytical tool. It enables us to study specific mechanisms in isolation before reconnecting them to form a coherent whole. As Victoria Chick has argued, economic analysis must recognise that events unfold in a distinct sequence over time, with past developments incorporated into the initial conditions. This, in essence, captures our own method. Each subsystem — wages, demand, saving, prices, and money — has been examined individually to clarify its internal logic before being reassembled to reveal the dynamic interaction of the economy as a whole.

The logic of this interaction has been shown to be intrinsically dynamic. When wage policy is insufficient, higher government deficits are required to support domestic demand than would be needed under stronger wage growth. A well-functioning economy, in turn, tends to have a positive effect on wages. Economic analysis must therefore remain flexible, as the initial conditions are in continuous flux.

The conclusion is that the current era represents a form of capitalism marked by only a few remaining trade-offs. Yet this potential is currently undermined by inadequate economic policies and could only be realised through well-designed policymaking. With constant returns to scale, well-functioning labour unions, and rapid technological progress — including advances in engineering and artificial intelligence — it is theoretically possible to achieve permanent full employment without triggering inflation. In this sense, a second Golden Age (The Golden Age was a time in the 1950s and 1960s of strong economic growth, full employment, and stability without major financial crises) appears within reach. As in the first Golden Age of the 1950s and 1960s, prosperity should again be shared more evenly, making a wealth tax a necessary instrument of policy. In essence, two steps are required: (1) to unlock the economy’s full potential, and (2) to ensure that the resulting output is distributed more fairly.

It must also be noted that the open system of the economy is a subsystem of the planet (Daly, H. 2022). Consequently, the natural limitations of the resources exploited in the course of economic activity must also be recognised. These constraints can be analysed through Keynes’s concept of user cost — that is, by considering how much it will cost us in the future to irreversibly use up resources today (Davidson, P. 1979). The right policy must be found here that regulates the cause, i.e. the extraction of resources. This is not about finding the “right” prices — only the Oracle of Delphi could do that — but about establishing effective regulation of resource extraction. As long as ever more resources are extracted each year without regulation, they will inevitably be consumed — a clear case of path dependency — so that the question of sufficient decoupling does not even arise in the first place.

The Future is not predictable

"In reality, Keynes breaks Say's Law at all the points where households and firms interact - in the market for labour, through the saving-investment nexus, and in the market for output- and it is not really money that causes the trouble, but time - the sheer fact that commitments are based on future demands, costs and prices. These cannot be known for certain, but commitments must be made regardless." (Chick, V. 1983: 10).

We have now spent considerable time examining the methodology. Perhaps we are now ready to grasp the nature of capitalism as it truly is — ontologically — with each individual writing their own unpredictable story and each generation its own chapter of history. In an open system, anything can happen tomorrow, and from this we will now derive the fifth law. This concerns precisely the uncertainty of the future. In developing this idea, I shall use the scientifically appropriate terminology — rather than the somewhat misleading notion of “non ergodicity” associated with our legend Paul Davidson, although his contribution to this field remains substantial (Alvarez/Ehnts 2015).

To begin with, it is crucial to distinguish between risk and uncertainty. In mainstream economic theories, only risk is acknowledged — that is, situations in which the probabilities of future events are known or can be calculated. Under such conditions, the calculation of a perfect interest rate remains possible: while the future is not fully known, the probabilities of all potential cash flows/outcomes are, allowing the value of a business to be derived with mathematical precision.

Uncertainty, however, extends far beyond this. Neither the probabilities of possible outcomes nor the full range of future possibilities can be known. The future itself is created through the decisions we make today and tomorrow and is therefore indeterminate both in probability and in form. In this sense, the future can be modified by human decisions — a principle that again corresponds closely to the conception of the economy as an open system. In a sense, this is also a strategic advantage, because if the future is shaped by our actions, it demonstrates our ability to bring about real change and foster a “yes, we can” attitude within the Our Money movement.

This kind of uncertainty stems not from imperfect information or limited cognitive abilities on the part of individual agents, but from the very structure of reality. From a young Hayekian, epistemological perspective, one might imagine a being of infinite intelligence and perfect information who could, in principle, foresee the future. From the post-Keynesian, ontological perspective — as articulated by Davidson 1994 and Lawson 1997 — even an omniscient and perfectly intelligent agent could not know the future.

In an open system, no one can truly know the future, for any change in knowledge would itself alter behaviour and thereby transform the course of events — making the future inherently unpredictable. What can be addressed, however, is not individual ignorance but systemic uncertainty. Unlike the mainstream view, which seeks to reduce uncertainty at the level of the individual through the management of information, this approach emphasises the systemic dimension: uncertainty can only be mitigated through institutions that embody the principles discussed in the first four chapters — institutions that provide a stable and dependable environment for decision-making under uncertainty.

At its core, the argument holds that the future is not merely unknown but unknowable. It is written only through our actions. No “correct” rate of interest can ever be determined; saving occurs for an indeterminate future, and entrepreneurial activity rests upon intuition — supported by calculation, yet always aware that such calculation can never be complete. Economic forecasts, accordingly, are not just imprecise — they are fundamentally uncertain.

You now have the Big Five together and have successfully completed the introduction to macroeconomics. To explore this topic in greater depth, I recommend Tony Lawson’s Economics and Reality (1997). Especially in the methodological field, there are still significant gaps — ones that I intend to address in my doctoral research.

If you are interested in working with me as an editor, interview guest or guest lecturer, or if you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch: mmtmitjan@gmx.de

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Literature Recommendations:

Fundamental Post-Keynesian Thinkers:

To understand Keynes General Theory: Paul Davidson – Post-Keynesian Macroeconomic Theory: A Foundation for Successful Economic Policies for the Twenty-First Century, 1994, ISBN 9781852788353

To understand the methodology of the General Theory: Victoria Chick – Macroeconomics After Keynes: A Reconsideration of the General Theory, 1983, ISBN 9780262530453

To understand the social and distributional aspects of The General Theory (the final two chapters): Hyman P. Minsky – John Maynard Keynes, 1975, ISBN 9780071593014

MMT and Books on the Monetary System:

L. Randall Wray – Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability, 1998, ISBN 9781858986760

The most comprehensive introduction: L. Randall Wray – Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems, 2012, ISBN 9780230368897

To understand the monetary system as an institutional object, explained through the work of my mentor: Dirk Ehnts – Modern Money Theory: A Simple Guide to the Monetary System, 2024, ISBN 9783031478840

Stephanie Kelton – The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, 2020, ISBN 9781541736184

To grasp MMT most quickly: Warren Mosler – The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, 2010, ISBN 9780692009598

Warren Mosler – Soft Currency Economics II: The Origin of Modern Monetary Theory, 2012, ISBN 9780615688325

Introductions to Post-Keynesian Economics:

Good for gaining an initial understanding of the different strands of Post-Keynesianism: John E. King – Advanced Introduction to Post Keynesian Economics, 2015, ISBN 9781782548423

Short introduction for orientation: Marc Lavoie – Introduction to Post-Keynesian Economics, 2006, ISBN 9780230520004

The most comprehensive book in economics, recommended only for master’s students: Marc Lavoie – Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations, 2022, ISBN 9783030759209

Introduction to the empirical school of my mentor – a rigorous, scientifically grounded and empirically oriented work, available only in German: Heiner Flassbeck – Grundlagen einer relevanten Ökonomik, 2024, ISBN 9783864894145

Steve Keen – The New Economics: A Manifesto, 2022, ISBN 9781509547393

Ecological Economics

Recommended overview literature: Peter Victor – Escape from Overshoot: Economics for a Planet in Peril, 2023, ISBN 9780865719758

Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter and Aaron Vansintjan – The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, 2022, ISBN 9781839765841

Further Literature

The world changes – it is dangerous when ideas stay the same: Mark Blyth – Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, 2013, ISBN 9780199389445

To understand scientific methodology – not only to know what is right, but also why; unique in its quality: Tony Lawson – Economics and Reality, 1997, ISBN 9780415144009

Heiner Flassbeck and Friederike Spiecker – Das Ende der Massenarbeitslosigkeit: Plädoyer für eine neue Wirtschaftspolitik, 2007, ISBN 9783593384102