That economics is a value-laden science is not a new idea. Most of the prominent economic thinkers were also philosophers, wary of moral and philosophical content of scientific assumptions, models, and theories. That economics needs philosophy, and the separation between these two cannot be maintained any longer, is gaining recognition, and has become a subject… Read More Scientist qua scientist, scientist qua citizen: Part I
1000 word summary of Quaid-e-Azam Lecture at PSDE 33rd AGM held on 14th Dec, 2017 at Islamabad. Published in Express Tribune & the Nation 13th Jan 2018. 43m Video Lecture on YouTube: The main thesis of our lecture is that our quest for prosperity has failed to deliver the sought-after goals because we have misunderstood the meaning of prosperity , and looked… Read More Prosperity as Human Development, not Wealth
Because of Western dominance, brilliant thinkers from the East get very little attention in global media. Even though brilliant economists from East Asia and China have created globally acknowledged economic miracles in their countries, none of them have received a Nobel Prize. On the other hand, Western economists whose theories were demonstrably in conflict with… Read More The Human Development Revolution
Part 2 of Lecture on Spirituality and Development: Friday, 27th Jan 2017 by Dr. Asad Zaman, VC PIDE — for Students of Religion & Development Paper, Center of Development Studies, University of Cambridge. Link for part 1: Spirituality . 50m Video lecture: OUTLINE OF LECTURE: The meaning of development has varied dramatically across time, space, cultures. When Britannia… Read More Spirituality and Development: Part 2, Development
{bit.ly/AZSpirit} Friday, 26th Jan 2017: Lecture by Dr. Asad Zaman, VC PIDE to students at University of Cambridge, Center of Development Studies for Religion & Development paper. 40 minute video recording of lecture on you-tube. For related posts, see: An Islamic Approach to Humanities. Part 1: “What Is Spirituality?”: Modern Secular thought takes spirituality and religion to… Read More Spirituality & Development
{bit.ly/WEAhpp} See also: SSRN Paper and WEA Commentaries If any group of concerned citizens would gather to discuss economic problems, it would seem natural to begin with the problem of feeding the hungry. Strangely enough, one would not encounter this problem within a standard course of study of economic theory at any of the leading… Read More Hunger as the Primary Economic Problem
A driving spirit of the modern age is the desire to banish all speculation about things beyond the physical and observable realms of our existence. This spirit was well expressed by one of the leading Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume, who called for burning all books which did not deal with the observable and quantifiable phenomena:… Read More Re-Introducing Ethics in Education
{bit.ly/AZetid} Ideology and Science are diametrically opposed to each other. An ideology is a set of beliefs that is maintained even in face of strong empirical evidence to the contrary. Science is primarily concerned with explaining the empirical evidence. Theories which conflict with observations are rejected. This does not mean that ideology is necessarily wrong… Read More Economic Theory as Ideology
The perpetuation of inequality through clustering in neighborhoods is graphically depicted in: “Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life” by Alvin Chang. Of course, this concept cannot even be formulated in conventional economic theory. I think we must move beyond the idea that neoclassical economic theory is “wrong” and come to the… Read More Remembering Muhammad Ali
{bit.ly/HEccc} Modern economic theory is founded on the principle that human beings “maximize utility”; that is, they choose the best action from among a collection of choices. This axiom is considered self-evident: why would anyone make an inferior choice, when a better option is available? However, the mathematical formulation of this axiom is far from… Read More Homo Economicus: Cold, Calculating & Callous
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