Macroeconomic theory and policy are strongly based on the assumption that economic growth is a fundamental goal. The environmental realities of the twenty- first century compel a reassessment of macro theory in terms of the impact of current growth patterns on planetary ecosystems.This paper...

It can be difficult to incorporate ecological and feminist concerns into introductory courses based on neoclassical analysis. We have faced these issues head-on as we have worked on writing introductory economics textbooks, Microeconomics in Context (Goodwin, Nelson, Ackerman and Weisskopf,...

The 2010 debate over extending the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts often focused the fairness of the tax distribution in the United States. Unfortunately, discussions of tax fairness rarely take into account the distribution of the overall tax system, typically focusing only on the federal income...

Revamping the Social Security program has become a domestic policy priority of the Bush administration. The President has stated that the system is facing a “crisis” and will be “bankrupt” in 2041. His proposal to change Social Security is centered on the introduction of private accounts...

The Bush administration advocates its January 2003 proposal to repeal personal dividend taxation on the basis that the cut would stimulate the economy, primarily benefit American seniors, and eliminate an unfair case of "double taxation." This paper primarily analyzes the proposal using a...

This paper asserts that a significant increase in public funding for climate change research and development (R&D) is needed in the United States. While additional public R&D funding alone is unlikely to provide a sufficient policy response to climate change, it is a critical policy component in...

The political debate over recent reforms of the federal income tax in the United States has focused attention on the fairness of taxes. While the Bush administration claims its reforms make taxes fairer, critics counter that the majority of the tax cuts accrue to the wealthy. While the fairness...

The impetus for this paper is the urgent need is to figure out how a non-growing – even a shrinking – economy may be able to provide human well-being while beginning to restore the health of natural world. Twentieth century economic theory is not well able to conceptualize this problem,...

This paper starts with the question of whether climate change will require a significant reduction of consumption among the richer people in the world, and ends with the most optimistic picture the author can conjure up, of the world in the year 2075. That hopeful picture is of a world in which...