Inequality and Joblessness by Design: Rethinking Public Policy (Pavlina Tcherneva)

There is an intimate link between joblessness and inequality–one that has become more pronounced in recent decades. The talk will examine the worsening of the income distribution and labor markets in postwar U.S. and explore the direct contribution public policy has made to these trends. It offers a critique of conventional fiscal policy and re-envisions the direction and manner of macroeconomic stabilization, in ways to deliver sustainable provisioning and shared prosperity.

What Does Modern Money Tell Us About the Economics of Sustainability? (Scott Fullwiler)

The core lessons learned from an understanding of how the monetary system works–governments are not financially constrained, loans create deposits, and so forth–are missing from both neoclassical environmental economics and heterodox ecological economics. This presentation corrects some important errors often seen in applying economics to sustainability and to policies related to the natural environment; it then considers how sustainability and ecological resilience could be strengthened if an appropriate understanding of the monetary system is integrated into the economics of sustainability.

Reforming Finance to Promote the Capital Development of the Economy (L. Randall Wray)

Over the past few decades, the financial system has been transformed into little more than high stakes gambling, putting our economy at risk of serial bubble-and-bust cycles. It no longer serves us well, indeed, it actually impedes growth of employment with rising living standards. We will synthesize the insights of Keynes, Schumpeter and Minsky to formulate a strategy that will promote the capital development of the economy. To do this , we must reform finance so that it is redirected to financing development, broadly construed to include private investment, investment in our labor force, and public infrastructure investment.

The Value of Human Capital, and How Investors Can Finance Sustainable Prosperity (R. Paul Herman)

Land, labor and capital: three essentials for economic theory, but regulatory reporting and managerial accounting ignore the maxim “people are our greatest asset,” instead promoting extractive human resource practices – paying less, stripping benefits, and suboptimization of the entire labor force.