It’s Praxis! A podcast from The Green Institute on understanding the economy, and how it dominates our lives. For this limited series, we’re speaking to leading experts in critical economics from across Australia, tackling the biggest questions and giving you the tools to critique common economic stories and apply an economic lens to politics.
For our first episode, hosts Max Chandler-Mather and Bec Sparks will set up our series and what we hope you’ll get out of listening to it, and our aims of supporting and encouraging a more intellectually curious left politics in Australia, through this podcast and its sister course on political economy in Brisbane.
Then, our first guest is Dr Matt Ryan, a political economist with the University of Technology Sydney, an expert on the past, present, and future of capitalism, and former climate & energy researcher with The Australia Institute.
We challenge Matt to give us the briefest ever intro to the history of capitalism, from the closures of ‘the commons’ in England forcing peasants off of their land and into industrial centres, through to the violent European colonisation of the global south, the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism post WW2, stagflation crises of the 1970s, and the emergence of neoliberalism (whew!). Along the way, we get to discuss how a historical view of economics can help to understand the problems we face now, including energy transition and capitalism’s tendency towards crisis, how neoclassical economics gets Matt into trouble with cab drivers, and which Nobel Prize-winning climate economist can get f******.
Share your thoughts and comments on this podcast on YouTube or by emailing us at praxispod@greeninstitute.org.au
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This podcast is only possible with the support of the builders of The Green Institute, our regular monthly donors. A regular donation of as little as $10 a month helps power our mission to build a mass movement powerful enough to replace establishment politics in this country, and helps us to be able to run programs like these and spread the in-person Praxis course across the country.
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Matt’s recommended readings and other mentions:
Praxis is hosted by Max Chandler-Mather and Bec Sparks, produced by The Green Institute, James Cummins and Michael Griffin.
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