Heim to Speak in Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series

Carol HeimProfessor Carol Heim will speak as part of the UMass Amherst Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series, an honor that includes the awarding of a Chancellor’s Medal, the highest recognition bestowed on UMass Amherst faculty. 

Heim will deliver her talk, “Who Pays, Who Benefits, Who Decides? Property Developers and the Political Economy of Urban Growth,” on Wednesday, March 27, at 4 p.m. in the Great Hall, Old Chapel. The lecture is free and open to the public.

UMass Economics in the News

The Devil Is in the Details: Implications of Samuel Bowles’s The Moral Economy for Economics and Policy Research
by Rachel Kranton
All economists should buy and read The Moral Economy by Samuel Bowles. The book challenges basic premises of economic theory and questions policies based on monetary incentives. Incentives not only crowd out intrinsic motivations, they erode the ethical and moral codes necessary for the workings of markets. Bowles boldly suggests that successful policies must combine incentives and moral messages, exploiting complementarities between the two. This essay argues that to achieve this objective, economists must study the local institutions and social context and engage untraditional data to uncover the interplay of incentives and identity.

An analysis of costs of the proposed Green New Deal quotes Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor of economics, who says that he thinks it’s possible for the U.S. to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 by spending about 2 percent of the gross national product each year, or around $18 trillion in total. Pollin says that the goal of getting to net zero in a decade — by 2030 — is completely unrealistic. (NBC 10 Boston, 3/14/19)