It can be difficult to incorporate ecological and feminist concerns into introductory courses, when one is also obliged to teach neoclassical analysis. In this essay we briefly describe how one might extend existing “multi-paradigmatic” approaches to feminist and ecological concerns, and...

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,...

This paper describes an alternative paradigm, "contextual economics," which is being developed, initially, in the form of an introductory microeconomics textbook. This paradigm gives special attention to the goals of economic actors and of the discipline of economics; and to the physical and the...

Macroeconomic theory has not yet come to grips with major issues of the twenty- first century. These include environmental pressures, demographic changes, the size, structure, and power of multinational corporations, and growing economic inequality. Existing macroeconomic theory also does not...

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...

The concept of capital has a number of different meanings. It is useful to differentiate between five kinds of capital: financial, natural, produced, human, and social. All are stocks that have the capacity to produce flows of economically desirable outputs. The maintenance of all five kinds of...