REIN Reading Circle: Recent Episodes
REIN
The Reading Circle of Rethinking Economics India Network discussing ideas from Pluralist and Heterodox Economics.
Rethinking Economics India Network is a network of students, academics and professionals building a better economics in society and the classroom.
Sign up Form: https://india850453.typeform.com/to/JgdBnKaa
Reading Circle Page: https://www.notion.so/Rethinking-Economics-India-Reading-Circle-d9e9b5d01cd34046bd331e0e45127fb2
We will be reading:
https://hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china
The dream of total information became a nightmare in postwar China | Aeon Essays
We will be reading:
Aiyar, Y. (2019). Schooling is not Learning. Centre for Policy Research.
Priya, L. (2020). How Does the National Education Policy Accelerate the Privatisation. Economic and Political Weekly.
Our goal for the first session is twofold: First, we aim to understand the origin and historical use of the theory of public goods argument that's frequently deployed in debates on the provisioning of education. Second, we aim to critically evaluate the claims the public goods argument makes in order to identify its limitations when informing education policy.
We will be reading:
- Daviet, B. (2016) Revisiting the Principle of Education as a Public Good. Education Research and Foresight Series, No. 17. Paris: UNESCO.
- Williams, G. (2016) 'Higher education: Public good or private commodity?' London Review of Education, 14 (1), 131–42.
Session 15 of REIN Reading Circle.
*Topic of discussion
We will discuss the idea of 'Indian Economics' that emerged during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Scholars tried bringing in historical particularities and nationalism to their study of the Indian economy, set against the background of the emergent nationalist movement. Through this we will look at questions of development, education and pedagogy, and what are the implications of placing the nation as a central category of analysis in economic thought.*
Essential reading
Ranade, Mahadev Govind. 1906. Chapter 1: "Indian Political Economy", in Essays on Indian Economics: Collection of Essays and Speeches. Madras: G.A. Nateson and Co. [the primary text which inspired a generation of economists to work upon a conception of Indian Economics, aspiring to induct history and the national interest in their economic writings.]
Goswami, Manu. 2004. Chapter 7: "Political Economy of Nationhood", in Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Oxford: Permanent Black, pp.209-241.
Suggested reading (Optional)
Goswami, Manu. 2004. Chapter 8: "Territorial Nativism: Swadeshi and Swaraj", in Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Oxford: Permanent Black, pp.242-276.
[this chapter looks at the early-twentieth century swadeshi movement and its quest to create an organic national community and national economy. It links up closely with the creation of a homogenous and singular national identity]
Karak, Anirban. 2020. "What was 'Indian' Political Economy? On the separation of the 'social, the 'economic', and the 'ethical' in Indian nationalist thought, 1892-1948", Modern Asian Studies.
Ambirajan, S. 1978. "Introduction", in Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. [shows the importance of political economy to the administration of British India and sets a background to the importance of studying the history of political economy in a colonial context]
Session 14 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
- Lecture One - On the Great Divide in Economic Theory by Krishna BharadwajKrishna Bharadwaj.pdf
- Aspromourgos, T. (2017, July 6). Why History of Economics? Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10370196.2017.1339580?journalCode=rher20
- Thomas, A. M. (2020, November 7). A History of Contemporary Economic Theories. Economic and Political Weekly. https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/45/book-reviews/history-contemporary-economic-theories.html
Session 13 of REIN Reading Circle.
Readings: Arguments for gig economy
- Thornton, M. (2020, February 19). Legislation Should Help Rather Than Hinder the Gig Economy. Mises Institute. https://mises.org/power-market/legislation-should-help-rather-hinder-gig-economy
- Schwellnus, C., Geva, A., Pak, M., & Veiel, R. (2019). GIG ECONOMY PLATFORMS: BOON OR BANE? OECD. https://fairgig.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ECO-WKP201919.pdf
Arguments against gig economy
- Lawrence, M. (2020, December 2). Common Wealth: To #MakeAmazonPay, Reimagine the Platform Economy. Progressive International. https://progressive.international/wire/2020-12-02-common-wealth-to-makeamazonpay-reimagine-the-platform-economy/en/
- Zarkadakis, G. (2021, May 14). Do platforms work? Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/workers-of-the-world-unite-on-distributed-digital-platforms
Session 12 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
- Singh, Jaivir. “Who Is a Worker?” Labour, Employment and Economic Growth in India, edited by K. V. Ramaswamy, 2015, pp. 265–91. Crossref, doi:10.1017/cbo9781316156476.011. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316156476.011
- Basole, Amit, et al. “The Time Is Right for an Urban Employment Guarantee Programme.” The India Forum, 30 Nov. 2020, www.theindiaforum.in/article/time-right-urban-employment-guarantee-programme.
- Mohanty, Manoranjan. “Chapter 2 - Migrant Labour on Centre Stage: But Politics Fails Them.” Migration, Workers, and Fundamental Freedoms: Pandemic Vulnerabilities and States of Exception in India, 1st ed., Routledge India, 2021, pp. 9–23. https://www.routledge.com/Migration-Workers-and-Fundamental-Freedoms-Pandemic-Vulnerabilities-and/Hans-Kannabiran-Mohanty-Pushpendra/p/book/9780367641559
Session 11 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
- Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice.
- Chapter 1: The Economics of Caste from The Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India.
- The Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t been a “great equaliser” for India’s queer population.
Session 10 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
- Ambedkar: Economics crucial for social justice https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/comment/ambedkar-economics-crucial-for-social-justice-442714
- Caste and Economic Discrimination: Causes, Consequences and Remedies by Sukhadeo Thorat, Katherine S Newman https://www.im4change.org/siteadmin/tinymce/uploaded/Caste_and_Economic_Discrimination_Causes_Consequences_and_Remedies_1.pdf
- The caste aways https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/64EeWQ7wsyf56vQrNIK9TN/The-caste-aways.html
- Optional Reading: The Doctor and the Saint by Arundhati Roy
Session 9 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
A. IMPACT OF EXTREME CLIMATE EVENTS ON GENDER INEQUALITY
- Ahmed, K.J., Haq, S.M.A. & Bartiaux, F. The nexus between extreme weather events, sexual violence, and early marriage: a study of vulnerable populations in Bangladesh. Popul Environ 40, 303–324 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-019-0312-3
B. GENDERED ASPECT OF CLIMATE CHANGE INDUCED MIGRATION
2. Patel. Amrita and Giri Jasmine (2019). Climate Change, Migration and Women: Analysing Construction Workers in Odisha. Sage journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0049085718821756
C. WHY GENDER MATTERS IN ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE?
3. IISD-Blog article: https://www.iisd.org/articles/gender-climate-change
4. CARE International (2020). Evicted by Climate Change-Confronting the Gendered Impacts of Climate-Induced Displacement. (Chapters 2, 4 and 5) https://careclimatechange.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/CARE-Climate-Migration-Report-v0.4.pdf
Session 8 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
- Ch 2- Hot Money: How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet from the book -This changes everything: capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein.
- Ch 7- Economic Institutions and the Natural environment from the book Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment by Partha Dasgupta.
- Ch 4- Policy instruments for emission reduction from the book Climate Economics: Economic Analysis of Climate, Climate Change and Climate Policy by Richard SJ Tol.
Session 7 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
- Legal Institutionalism: Capitalism and the Constitutive Role of Law by Simon Deakin et. al.
- The Code of Capital by Katharina Pistor - Chapter 9 - "Capital Rules by Law"
- (Optional) Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay - Chapter 5: Capital: A Self-Governing City
Session 6 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein - Introduction and Chapter 2.
- Present Crises of Capitalism and Its Reforms by Pulin B. Nayak.
Session 5 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
- Globalization, labour standards, and women's rights: dilemmas of collective (in)action in an interdependent world – Naila Kabeer
- Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men by Caroline Criado-Perez - Preface as well as Chapter 5: The Henry Higgins effect
- An interesting episode: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/invisible-women/
Session 4 of REIN Reading Circle.
The readings we will be discussing:
- Gender in Economics: The Indian Experience by U. Kalpagam - It is a broad overview of how social sciences intersect with economics in feminist concerns in the Indian subcontinent.
- “Bargaining and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household" by Bina Agrawal.
- Optional but only a few pages- Interview of Silvia Federici by Mathew Carlin about reproductive labour, non-waged labour in Marxism.
Session 3 of REIN Reading Circle.
The premise of any economic model is grounded on the categories that frame its inquiry. This week's readings seek to trouble the ways in which economics as a discipline imagines reality, and the categories it uses to translate lived experience into analyzable data. This set should provoke economics to confront the distance that there might be in the way they conceptualise and taxonomize reality, and the way in which its subjects, that is ordinary people imagine their own world. An entry into the discourses and power structures that have historically informed the way economics approaches its object of inquiry will hopefully be questioned through a close reading of these materials
The readings we will be discussing:
- Preface and Ch. 6, Thompson, E. P. (2002). The Making of the English Working Class. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited
- Introduction, Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. United States: University of California Press
- Preface, Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited
- (Optional reading): Introduction, Anand, N. (2017). Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. United Kingdom: Duke University Press.