Department of Economics, John Jay College, CUNY

Kirstin Munro. Ordinary Business: Mundane Economics and the Production of Everyday Life
2024-10-28 13:30 - 15:00 UTC | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
Kirstin Munro is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. Based on qualitative interviews with sustainability-oriented parents of young children, Munro’s Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households: Compromise, Conflict, Complicity describes what happens when people make interventions into mundane and easy-to-overlook aspects of everyday life to bring the way they get things done into alignment with their environmental values. Because the ability to make changes is constrained by their culture and capitalist society, there are negative consequences and trade-offs involved in these household-level sustainability practices. The households described in this book shed light on the full extent of the trade-offs involved in promoting sustainability at the household level as a solution to environmental problems.

Clara Mattei: The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
2024-10-16 13:40 - 15:00 | L2.84 NB
“In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.
Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies “succeeded,” relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism.”

Yonit Manor-Percival. Post-Colonial Globalization: Law, Power, and Actors in the 21st Century
2024-09-25 13:30 - 15:00 | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
Yonit Manor-Percival is a solicitor of England and Wales who lectures at the Centre of Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London and is a research associate at SOAS. Her main research interests are in international law, foreign investment law and the interface between national and international law, society and corporations within the framework of globalized capitalism’s political economy. The book uses the prism of the law to reflect on three interrelated themes. One is the act of taking, the second is capitalist private property and the third is enclosures.

Benjamin Barson. Concert and Book Launch: Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons
2024-09-23 13:30 - 15:00 | Room 9.64 NB, John Jay College 524 West 59th Street
Join us to celebrate the launch of Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons. This book recasts the birth of jazz, and unearths vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Black brass bands rehearsed participatory democracy through collective performance, and their militant spirit embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction–“Brassroots Democracy.” Benjamin Barson presents a transnational “music history from below,” tracing how the families of prominent early jazz traversed New Orleans, Mexico, and Haiti, as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes.

Isabella Weber. Prices, Inflation, and Survival in an Age of Emergencies: Why We Need a New Paradigm
2024-09-11 19:00 - 21:00 | Moot Court 6.68 NB, 524 W 59th St, New York, New York, 10019
Part of our Economic Justice Speaker Series
Isabella M. Weber is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University, and a Fellow of the OSF Ideas Workshop. Her next book, ESSENTIAL: Inflation, Profits and Survival in an Age of Emergencies, will be published in 2026 by Penguin Allen Lane in the UK and University of Chicago Press in the US, and will be translated into seven languages.
Please RSVP here or use the QR code.

Summer Show with Speakers and Music
2024-06-08 14:00 - 20:00 | The People’s Garden, 1237 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY, 11221, United States
BYO Food to grill!
Speakers:
Mike Morgan (Hardcrackers)
Stephanie Attar (Borough of Manhattan Community College)
John Garvey (Hardcrackers)
Music:
Minaxi
Miriam Elhajli
Jonah Wolf
Light Sweet Crude
Will Moloney
The Lorraines

Student Conference
2024-05-10 10:00 - 16:00 | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
[10am-11am] Breakfast (Haaren Hall 336)
[11am-1pm] Presentations
[1pm-2pm] Lunch (Haaren Hall 336)
[2pm-4pm] Presentations
[4pm] Food and Party (Haaren Hall 336)
Paper topics and room numbers can be found in the conference program.

Gerald Epstein. Busting the Bankers' Club: Finance for the Rest of Us
2024-04-10 13:40 - 15:00 | Room L2.85, John Jay College 524 West 59th Street
Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a Founding Codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Political Economy of Central Banking: Contested Control and the Power of Finance. His new book, Busting the Bankers’ Club, recently published by the University of California Press documents the promises and roadblocks of reforming our broken and unfair financial system.

Power for a Just Transition
2024-03-30 09:00 - 17:30 | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
Using Law and Political Economy as a guiding framework, this workshop will host emerging scholarship in conversation with academics and policymakers, working to identify innovative methods of analysis from law, economics, sociology, or policy that can interrogate and combat hegemonic and capitalist power.
Featuring keynote speakers Kate Aronoff (Writer for New Republic) and Isabel Estevez (Deputy Director of Industrial Policy and Trade at the Roosevelt Institute), this workshop will provide a specific lens on climate policy, addressing crucial questions about public intervention, industrial policy, and democratic governance in the face of climate catastrophe and authoritarian capitalism.
The event will also host a roundtable discussion on regulation, state action, and governance featuring Clara Mattei (New School), An Li (Sarah Lawrence), JW Mason (John Jay), and Jamee Moudud (Sarah Lawrence) moderated by Martha McCluskey (University of Buffalo).
Attendance is free and breakfast and lunch will be served complimentary for all conference attendees.
Register at
BIT.LY/APPEAL-SPRING24

Michael Heinrich. "Today's Political Value of Marx's Theory of Value"
2024-03-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Room 9.64 NB, John Jay College 524 West 59th Street
Michael Heinrich is a German historian of philosophy, political scientist, and mathematician, specializing in the critical study of the development of Marx’s thought. He has written in depth on Marx’s critique of political economy in his book, The Science of Value. His An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital is probably the most popular introduction to Marx’s economic works in Germany.
