Julie A. Nelson is Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston and Senior Research Fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University. Over the last 30 years and more she has established herself as a highly respected voice on many aspects of economics, most notably social and environmental policy, ethics, feminism and economics. Her work often has a methodological frame of reference, though she also has a longstanding record in applied economics (initially micro) and worked for the World Bank and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics early in her career. She is the author or co-editor of such well-known books as Economics for Humans (Nelson, 2018) and Beyond Economic Man (Ferber and Nelson, 1993). Her published work spans the mainstream-heterodox divide (for example, American Economic Review, Ecological Economics and Cambridge Journal of Economics). Moreover, her collaborative work on various textbooks has shown a laudable commitment to pluralism and the transformation of the curriculum and pedagogy of economics (for example, Goodwin et al., 2019). She was the 2019 President of the Association for Social Economics and is the editor of the Economics and Business Ethics section of the Journal of Business Ethics. Her work can be accessed at: https://sites.google.com/site/julieanelsoneconomist/home. Julie blogs at: https://julieanelson.com/category/economics/
Ecological and Feminist Economics: an Interview with Julie A. Nelson
It’s much easier to teach students how to shift curves, solve equations, and run regressions, than to carefully observe economic life and think deeply and critically about it. Students also tend to feel comfortable – and even feel powerful – when told “here, we are handing you the exact tools and models you need to use to understand how the economy works.”
April 15, 2020