In this second post on the annual ASSA economics conference, I look at the papers and presentations made by radical and heterodox economists. These presentations are mostly under the auspices of the Union of Radical Political Economics (URPE) sessions, but the Association of Evolutionary Economics also provided an umbrella for some sessions.

The mainstream was focused on whether the US and world economy were set to recover strongly or not after COVID; whether the hike in inflation would eventually subside or not and what to do about it. The heterodox sessions were more focused, as you would expect, on the fault-lines in modern capitalist economies and why inequality of wealth and income has risen.

Interestingly, this year most heterodox presentations came from the post-Keynesian framework and not from Marxist political economy. The most interesting paper came from Al Campbell of Utah University and Erdogan Bakir of Bucknell University. Bakir…