Visions for the Economy

These teaching packs are designed for 90-minute (online or offline) sessions that can be added to existing courses. They help students become familiar with an important topic that is often neglected. At some universities lectures and sessions are typically longer than 90 minutes and at others shorter. Feel free to adjust the material to make it with your context and purpose.

The goal of this teaching pack is to make students familiar with different visions for how the economy could be organised and enable them to critically reflect on such ideas. As future economic experts, it is important that they become aware of prominent proposals for reorganising the economy and practise how to deal with them. Lacking this knowledge would hamper them in their future work, as they will be required to provide advice and take actions while being uninformed about it. 

Visions for the economy can range from short-term concrete policy proposals to idealistic frameworks of utopian economic systems. These ideas about how to structure and organise an economy are crucial for any economist to be familiar with. The aim is not to turn economics students into believers of those visions. Instead, the goal is to make students knowledgeable about the variety of visions, so they can develop a good understanding of them and are able to inform non-economists about them. This is important because these economic visions are likely to shape the future: they are already influencing political movements and policy decisions.

The lecture explores different visions by looking in more detail at the examples of radical markets, economic bicameralism and degrowth. During the lecture students practise reflecting on their implications for freedom and fairness. In the final part of the class, students dive into another policy idea and reflect upon its logic, mechanics, and potential impact. 

If you are an educator and you are interested in receiving possible exam questions and assessment exercises, send us an email at economy.studies@ourneweconomy.nl and we will send them to you.