Z: **Archived**: Political Economy 101

Second Paper: Looking Forward to Your Concentration

Due 5 PM December 4.

Do either (1) or (2):

1. Pick an issue in contemporary political economy connected with your four-course Political Economy concentration-to-be. Briefly!--in 1400-2000 words--use what you have learned in your historical context courses and in Political Economy 100 and 101 to set out an analytic framework for analyzing that issue.

2. The reading list for this course has set out a bunch of intellectual "cage matches"--occasions where two smart people assigned disagree about the fundamentals of some issue. Some examples: Hobson v. Schumpeter, Keynes v. Friedman, Fallows v. Scott, Stiglitz v. Keynes, Anderson v. Polanyi, Keynes v. Orwell. Pick an issue, two thinkers assigned in this course who have different views on it, and briefly!--1400 to 2000 worth--referee their cage match: who wins? and why?

First Paper: What Is Most Surprising in the Twentieth Century?

Due 5 PM October 19.

Pick a thinker about economy, polity, society, and culture whom you studied in PE 100 (or would have studied if you had taken PE 100, or whom have read and who struck you as especially interesting). Write a paper of 1000 words or so about what things that happened in the first half of the twentieth century would have struck them as most surprising and what things would have struck them as most in accord with their intellectual positions. How do you think they would have changed their minds and altered their positions had they seen what we have seen?