"We as social scientists live in a society where clearly the general social and political environment affects the questions we ask,” said Arindrajit Dube, a labor economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016, his campaign was strikingly pro-labor. He proposed a $15-an-hour minimum wage, which was much further than most mainstream Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, were willing to go. He denounced a trans-Pacific trade deal that was anathema to many unions. He endorsed an organizing method, known as card check, that would allow workers to unionize without holding a secret-ballot election.
Fidan Ana Kurtulus spoke in favor of broad-based employee ownership of firms and cooperatives and how governments can enact policies to encourage the adoption and prevalence of employee ownership and cooperatives at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on October 24, 2019. 
In a recent working paper published by the UMass Amherst Political Economy Research Institute, Deepankar Basu has linked the massive parliamentary victory of the BJP in 2014 with a 300% increase in the level of antiminority hate crimes.
Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, will deliver the 2019 Samuel Bowles lecture on November 20th. Schor's talk is titled 'It's Beyond the Gig: Work and the Platform Economy.'
On October 4-5, 2019, a conference was organized at Columbia University, Department of Economics, to celebrate the illustrious careers of Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis, UMass Amherst Emeritus Professors of Economics. The program featured presentations by scholars from around the world including friends, colleagues and former students of Sam and Herb on various topics around the theme “Capitalism, Conflict, and Cooperation”. 
Every day it becomes clearer that we have to break our addiction to extracting dirty stuff from the ground to burn for energy. But how to pull it off without triggering political and economic chaos?
What drives economic growth and stagnation? What types of methodologies and tools do we need to accurately explain economic epochs in the past and present? What models and policy approaches can lead to prosperity for all? These questions occupied the mind of John Maynard Keynes from World War One until his death in 1946.
Growing rates of incarceration in the U.S. since the mid-1970s may be linked with a rise in drug-related mortality and may exacerbate the harmful health effects of economic hardship, according to an observational study involving 2,640 counties between 1983 and 2014, published in The Lancet Public Health journal. 