Economics

Ever since Thorstein Veblen, Harold Laski, and Wesley Clair Mitchell taught the first courses in economics at NSSR more than a century ago, The New School has enjoyed and nurtured a distinctive identity as an internationally leading center of critical scholarship in economics. In a discipline that has too often clung to a narrow set of methodological, theoretical, and empirical conventions, the Department of Economics at NSSR has always stood out for its intellectual breadth, as a place for scholarship that draws critically and creatively on a wide range of schools of thought and analytical tools to shed light on and transform contemporary societies.

Today, amid rising social and economic inequality, a planetary climate emergency, and a general sense that new generations face diminished prospects and heightened economic insecurity, our commitment to pluralism in economic thinking is more necessary than ever. This is a time to approach economics not only as the study of markets and their functioning but as an expansive field of inquiry into ways present and future societies can provide all their members with the means to lead comfortable and fulfilling lives. It is a time for contemporary versions of what former New School economics professor Robert Heilbroner so influentially termed the Worldly Philosophy.

Our faculty engage critically with the dominant marginalist approaches that shape much of contemporary economic thought while also developing and advancing insights from classical political economy, Marx and his modern interpreters, and the Keynesian, post-Keynesian, and structuralist traditions. Their research also engages with institutionalist, feminist, Austrian, stratification, and ecological approaches to economic analysis; the political economy of relations between the Global South and the Global North; and innovative perspectives emerging from mathematics, the physical and environmental sciences, and social inquiry beyond economics, including political and sociological analyses.

Our academic programs draw on this plurality of approaches, not as a catalog of disparate alternatives but as a means of providing students with a comprehensive framework for thinking about contemporary economic and social life. Graduate curricula are organized around four domains: microeconomics, macroeconomics, quantitative methods, and political economy. Courses in each domain provide students with both the high-level technical training expected of leading economics programs and the critical breadth that is distinctive to The New School. They are also designed to be inclusive, offering pathways that enable students with or without extensive training in mathematics and statistics to master the quantitative tools needed for contemporary economic analysis.

Graduates go on to careers in academia, international organizations, research institutes, government policymaking, and a wide range of private-sector industries. Our location in New York City provides unparalleled access to these opportunities, and its international reputation allows graduates to thrive wherever their careers take them.

Many of our faculty and students contribute to the research activities of The New School’s interdisciplinary institutes and centers, including the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies; the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis; the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy; and the India-China Institute. These centers, along with our seminars and working papers, contribute to the department’s continuing role as a vital international hub for critical, pluralist, and engaged economics.