Jamee K. Moudud

BS, MEng, Cornell University. MA, PhD (Honors), The New School for Social Research. Moudud is a board member of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law and a co-founder and on the editorial board of the Journal of Law and Political Economy. He is also on the editorial board of the journal, Money on the Left. As a contributor to the contemporary Law and Political Economy intellectual movement, his work focuses on understanding the nature of corporations and money and the ways in which constitutional clauses structure socioeconomic inequalities. Professor Moudud is currently working on a book entitled, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez-Faire?, to be published by Routledge as part of its Economics as Social Theory series. He is a Fellow in the Political Economy of Corporations Curriculum Project, University of California Berkeley. SLC, 2000–

Research and Interests

Over the past few years few years I have developed two new passions in my life, one of which is to study legal theory and legal history and their links to political economy, and the other is the electric guitar. On the law/political economy nexus, my focus is the study of the legal foundations of markets and of money and to understand how conflicts over property and contracts are at the heart of our economic system. This has led me in an intellectual direction that rejects the public/private divide, at the heart of much thinking in economics, and provides the basis for a new way of conceptualizing policy which is quite distinct from both the neoclassical and much of the alternative traditions in economics. In this endeavor I have been heavily influenced by Karl Polanyi, the Legal Realists (especially Robert Lee Hale, Wesley R. Hohfeld, and Morris N. Cohen), and the broad Critical Legal Studies tradition. I am involved with two exciting new scholarly groups, the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL) and ClassCrits. I am also collaborating with colleagues in these two groups to launch the Journal of Law and Political Economy. Finally, I am an Associate Editor with another journal, the Review of Keynesian Economics.

As for my electric guitar, I have found that in playing blues and classic rock the complexity of piecing together the notes to create a song oddly enough parallels the ways in which societies are constructed at a foundational level. Who would have thought that Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane or Deep Purple could be so profound!

Undergraduate Courses 2024-2025

Economics

Controversies in Microeconomics

Open, Seminar—Year

ECON 3553

What assumptions, methodologies, values, vision, and theoretical foundations do microeconomists incorporate and rely upon for analyzing economic behavior at the individual level? What insights, knowledge, inferences, and/or conclusions can be gleaned through examining characteristics of individual firms, agents, households, and markets in order to understand capitalist society? How do our theories of individual and business behavior inform our interpretation of distributional outcomes? Among other topics, this yearlong seminar in microeconomics will offer an inquiry into economic decision-making vis-à-vis: theories of demand and supply, the individual (agents), households, consumption (consumer choice); theories of production and costs; theories of the firm (business enterprise, corporations); theories of markets and competition; prices and pricing theory; and public policy. This course will provide a rigorous analysis of theory and policy in the neoclassical and broad critical political economy traditions. A central theoretical issue will be an engagement of the “governments versus markets” dichotomy, which is at the heart of neoclassical economics. This important theme will be addressed by investigating the rival treatments of institutions in neoclassical economics (New Institutional Economics) and the Law and Political Economy tradition. Among other topics, we will analyze how these different approaches to institutions and the economy study cost-benefit analysis, Pareto optimality, business competition, and the Coase Theorem. The spring semester will incorporate the study of business history.

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Law and Political Economy: Challenging Laissez Faire

Open, Lecture—Year

ECON 2044

This yearlong course, based on the professor’s new book—Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire?—introduces students to the emerging Law and Political Economy tradition in economics. The course will deal with four interrelated questions: (1) What does economic regulation mean? (2) What is the relationship between institutions, legal ones in particular, and the economy? (3) How does one theoretically analyze the nature of property rights, money, corporations, and power? (4) How does rethinking the relationship between law and the economy challenge conventional ideas about the nature of economic regulation? The course will seek to understand the nature of power and its relationship to institutions, especially legal ones, by considering property rights and money, the business corporation, constitutional political economy, the links between “free markets” and authoritarianism, colonialism and race, and inequality as it intersects across class, race, and gender lines. We will deal with these questions by focusing on the insights of the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realists and their relationship to the classical political economy tradition (especially Adam Smith and Karl Marx). The Law and Political Economy framework will be contrasted with the insights of New Institutional Economics, with the latter’s basis in neoclassical economics. Core questions that will be addressed include: What is laissez faire, and does legal-economic history show any proof of its existence? What is assumed when dueling perspectives advocate “more” or “less” government intervention; and are these, in fact, false binaries that distract from core questions of public policy and key challenges such as climate instability, growing inequality, and threats to democracy? No prior background in economics is required.

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Previous Courses

Economics

Econometric Analysis: Structural Explorations in the Social Sciences

Open, Lecture—Year

This course is designed for all students interested in the social sciences who wish to understand the methodology and techniques involved in the estimation of structural relationships between variables. The course is intended for students who wish to be able to carry out empirical work in their particular field, both at Sarah Lawrence College and beyond, and critically engage empirical work done by academic or professional social scientists. The practical, hands-on approach taken in this course will be useful to those students who wish to do future conference projects in the social (or natural) sciences with significant empirical content. The course will also be invaluable for students who are seeking internships, planning to enter the job market, or desiring to pursue graduate education in the social sciences and public policy. After taking this course, students will be able to analyze questions such as the following: What is the relationship between slavery and the development of capitalist industrialization in the United States? What effects do race, gender, and educational attainment have in the determination of wages? How does the female literacy rate affect the child mortality rate? How can one model the effect of economic growth on carbon-dioxide emissions? What is the relationship among sociopolitical instability, inequality, and economic growth? How do geographic location and state spending affect average public-school teacher salaries? How do socioeconomic factors determine the crime rate in the United States? During the course of the year, we will study all of these questions. In the first semester, we will cover the theoretical and applied statistical principles that underlie Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression techniques. We will begin with the assumptions needed to obtain the Best Linear Unbiased Estimates of a regression equation, also known as the “BLUE” conditions. Particular emphasis will be placed on the assumptions regarding the distribution of a model’s error term and other BLUE conditions. We will also cover hypothesis testing, sample selection, and the critical role of the t- and F-statistic in determining the statistical significance of an econometric model and its associated slope or “β” parameters. Further, we will address the three main problems associated with the violation of a particular BLUE assumption: multicollinearity, serial correlation, and heteroscedasticity. We will learn how to identify, address, and remedy each of these problems. In addition, we will take a similar approach to understanding and correcting model specification errors. The spring semester class will build on the fall class by introducing students to advanced topics in econometrics. We will study difference-in-difference estimators, autoregressive dependent lag (ARDL) models, co-integration, and error correction models involving nonstationary time series. We will investigate simultaneous equations systems, vector error correction (VEC), and vector autoregressive (VAR) models. The final part of the seminar will involve the study of panel data, as well as logit/probit models. As with the fall class, the spring class will also be very “hands-on,” in that students will get ample exposure to concrete issues while also being encouraged to consider basic methodological questions (e.g., the debates between John Maynard Keynes and Jan Tinbergen) regarding the power and limitations of econometric analysis. The spring semester is particularly relevant to students who wish to pursue graduate studies in a social-science discipline, although it will be equally relevant for those seeking other types of graduate degrees that involve knowledge of intermediate-level quantitative analysis.

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Economic Policy and the 2020 General Elections: Money, Trade, Industrial Policy, and Inequality

Open, Lecture—Year

We live in unprecedented, turbulent times in which a pandemic crisis has combined with a major economic crisis and plunged the world into chaos. How should we, as economists, understand the nature and roots of this crisis, and how do we think of a way forward for humanity beyond these dark times? Needless to say, the general elections of November 2020 loom large in our collective consciousness. While we can speculate or worry about the effects on political institutions as the new administration takes office in January 2021, we also need to pay crucial attention to key economic issues pertaining to jobs, inequality, health care, climate change, and industrial policy. In fact, it will be argued that the nature of political institutions, including any society’s legal foundations, cannot be divorced from economic outcomes. This course will focus on the above key themes by not only looking ahead but also by looking behind at recent history to understand the roots of our current turmoil. At every step of the way, students will be exposed to rival theoretical and methodological perspectives in economics.

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First-Year Studies: Historical Foundations of Economics: Politics, Power, Ideology, and Change

Open, FYS—Year

The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed two major economic crashes, the first one being the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/2008 and the second one being the pandemic crash of 2020. The irony is that, in conventional discourse (in, say, the mass media), the prelude to each of these economic catastrophes involved a triumphalist hubris that celebrated the stock-market booms, economic growth, and falling unemployment rates that occurred in each decade before the crashes occurred. As in the run-up to the previous crash, conventional commentators were blindsided when the world fell off the proverbial cliff. How did history, in a sense, repeat itself in 2020, yet political and economic “experts” at the highest levels of government and the mass media did not see the dangers ahead while they were celebrating “free markets”? The study of economics looms large with regard to the above questions; however, economics is hardly a monolithic discipline, since rival schools of thought in the discipline conceptualize the nature of markets, “market forces,” and policy in very different ways. This course will situate the current crisis in a theoretical and historical context by drawing on insights from different schools of thought in economics, as well as from other disciplines such as law, politics, sociology, and history. At the heart of this course is a methodological one that counterposes conventional or neoclassical economics, which sees the economy in apolitical and ahistorical terms, against other perspectives that argue that it is impossible to study economics outside a political, social, and historical context. Some of the key questions that we will study in this course are: Why do people distinguish between “regulation” and “deregulation” (laissez faire), and is that a false dichotomy? What if laissez-faire capitalism is, itself, the outcome of a particular type of regulatory system? What is the history of public policy in the United States and other countries? How do we understand the role of political power and the “rule of law” with regard to market outcomes? With inequality as one of the central themes of our current political climate, how do we understand its causes? And what is the link to the history of taxation policies in the United States? Can it be argued that the subprime mortgage crash of 2007/2008 and the pandemic crash of 2020 have the same roots; and, if so, what are they? These will be some of the questions that we will be tackling throughout the course of the year, thereby ensuring that students develop a solid foundation for the fundamental debates in economic theory and policy and understand the key role of methodology in the study of political economy phenomena. Finally, the goal is to ensure that students develop the ability to critically engage scholarly work in economics.

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First-Year Studies: The 2024 Presidential Election in Context: Inequality, the Climate Crisis, and the Global Far Right

FYS—Year

The 2024 presidential election result will have far-reaching implications for economic, social, and environmental policies. It will also be significant in terms of the future of American democracy and the power of the Far Right. In this course, we will situate current economic and political challenges in a theoretical and historical context by drawing on insights from different schools of thought in economics, as well as from other disciplines such as law, politics, sociology, and history. Some of the key questions to be addressed are as follows: How can the central debates in political economy help us understand some of the unprecedented challenges that we face, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; the climate crisis; and inequalities that intersect across class, race, and gender lines? Why is the study of history a central methodological concern for many economists, and why not so for others? Why do people distinguish between “regulation” and laissez-faire, and is this a false dichotomy? What is the history of industrial and social policy in the United States and other countries? How do we understand the role of political and corporate power and the “rule of law” in regard to market outcomes? These and others will be some of the questions that we will be tackling throughout the course of the year, thereby ensuring that students develop a solid understanding of the fundamental debates in economic theory and policy and see the key role of methodology in the study of political economy. Finally, the goal is to ensure that students develop the ability to critically engage scholarly work in economics. There will be weekly conferences for the first six weeks and biweekly conferences thereafter (at the discretion of the instructor).

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History of Political Economy and Economic History

Open, Seminar—Year

In this yearlong seminar, the fall semester will be devoted to the study of the theoretical debates on the history of economic and legal thought. It will be shown that the study of economics is incomplete without an understanding of the relationship of the economy to law and politics. These theoretical debates will be linked to transformations in capitalism in a number of different geographic contexts, especially the United States, Europe, and Africa. The dominant approach in contemporary economics is the neoclassical school. This course will introduce students to the origins, foundational tools and questions, and analytical constructs at the heart of both neoclassical and other schools of thought in economics. In the fall, the first part of the course will deal with what is called classical political economy (primarily Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx). Next, given that property, contracts, and torts are at the core of markets, the course will integrate the path-breaking insights from the linked American Legal Realist and Original Institutional Economics traditions to understand the legal institutional foundations of markets. The final part of the course will deal with the perspectives of some of the major founders of the neoclassical school (Léon Walras, William Stanley Jevons, and John Bates Clark) and their debates with institutional economists during the interwar period. Finally, the contemporary New Institutional Economics framework, with its foundations in neoclassical economics, will be compared with the insights of the original institutional economists and legal realists. The spring semester will be devoted to the study of two major topics: business history (including the study of colonialism, race, and slavery) and monetary history. The goal of the spring semester is to enable students to reflect on the applicability (or otherwise) of the theoretical perspectives discussed in the fall.

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Intermediate Microeconomics

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

What assumptions, methodologies, values, vision, and theoretical foundations do microeconomists incorporate and rely upon for analyzing economic behavior at the individual level? What insights, knowledge, inferences, and/or conclusions can be gleaned through examining characteristics of individual firms, agents, households, and markets in order to understand capitalist society? How do our theories of individual and business behavior inform our interpretation of distributional outcomes? Among other topics, this semester-long seminar in intermediate microeconomics will offer an inquiry into economic decision-making vis-à-vis: theories of demand and supply; the individual (agents); households; consumption (consumer choice); theories of production and costs; theories of the firm; theories of markets, market governance, and competition; prices and pricing theory; and business legal history. As a course that is designed for students interested in pursuing the study of economics at the graduate-school level, this course will provide a rigorous analysis of theory and policy in the neoclassical and political economy traditions. A central theoretical issue will be an engagement of the “governments versus markets” dichotomy, which is at the heart of neoclassical economics. This important theme will be addressed by investigating the rival treatments of institutions in neoclassical economics (new institutionalism) and the law and political economy tradition. Among other topics, we will analyze how these different approaches to institutions and the economy study cost-benefit analysis, Pareto optimality, business competition, and the Coase Theorem. Students should be prepared to deploy their high-school level math skills in dealing with certain topics.

Faculty

Introduction to Economic Theory and Policy

Open, Lecture—Year

This yearlong lecture will, broadly speaking, cover introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, including neoclassical, post-Keynesian, Marxian, feminist, and institutional political economy perspectives. The objective of the course is to enable students to understand the more “technical aspects” of economics (e.g., usage of supply/demand analysis within and outside neoclassical economics), as well as some economic history and the history of economic thought. The theoretical issues will be applied to contemporary policy debates, such as the Green New Deal, inequality, health care, and international trade.

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MA Health Advocacy

Economics of Health

Online

This course will examine many of the major issues facing the American health care system from a variety of economic perspectives. A wide range of topics will be covered, from the racial and economic disparities in health outcomes to the Patient Protection Act and alternative modes of financing of the medical care delivery system. Students will learn how the tools and analytic approaches used by economists can enhance the understanding of major public-health issues such as AIDS, reproductive care, and mental health, as well as key health care financing issues such as the rising cost of health care and our fragmented insurance system.

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Additional Information

Professional affiliations

Review of Keynesian Economics

Associate Editor

Research on Money and Finance, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Member, Coordinating Committee

Member, International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy

Associate, The Academic-Industry Research Network

Selected Publications

Co-organizing (with Shahnaz Rouse) an international conference entitled: Re-envisioning Pakistan: the Political Economy of Social Transformation (April 4-6 2014)

Industrial Organization, Labor Relations, and Labor Market Outcomes

Guest Editor for a special issue of Review of Keynesian Economics

(April 2014)

State-Business Relations and the Financing of the Welfare State in Latin America: Challenges and Prospects (with Enrique Delamonica and Esteban Perez) (2014)

Featured in The Road to Addis and Beyond: Financing for Social Development, a conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, July 2015

Paper for UNRISD (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development) project on The Politics of Domestic Resource Mobilization for Social Development

Review of 'Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience'

Dialectical Anthropology

(forthcoming)

The Political Economy of Public Investment and Public Finance: Challenges to Social Democratic Policies (with Francisco Martinez-Hernandez), (forthcoming)

Review of Keynesian Economics

Policy as a Contested Process: Notes for Heterodox Economists

Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Heterodox Economics

Lee, F. S. and Cronin, B (eds.). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar (2014)

Neoliberalism and the Developmental State: Considerations for the New Partnership for African Development (with Karl Botchway)

In Benjamin Bobo and Herman Sentim-Aboagye (eds) Building Africa: the Core Truth

Africa World Press (2012)

Constrained Economy and the Developmental State: From Successful Developmentalism to Catastrophic State Failure

New School, Graduate Program in International Affairs Working Paper

2011-110.

The Role of the State and Harrod’s Economic Dynamics. Toward a New Policy Agenda?

International Journal of Political Economy

vol. 38, no. 1. (2009)

The Search for a New Developmental State (with Karl Botchway)

International Journal of Political Economy

Fall (Special issue on the developmental state)

Challenging the Orthodoxy: African Development in the Age of Openness (with Karl Botchway)

African and Asian Studies

6 (2007)

Surplus

In William Darity, Jr., (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

2nd edition, 8 volumes, MacMillan Reference, Detroit, MI. (2007)

Competition

In William Darity, Jr., (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

2nd edition, 8 volumes, MacMillan Reference, Detroit, MI. (2007)

How State Policies can Raise Economic Growth

Challenge

March–April. (2006)

Economic Growth

In R. J. Barry Jones, (ed.) Encyclopedia of International Political Economy

Routledge Press, U.K. (2001)