The preliminary materials for the new module in Analisi Economica, part of the Master’s programme in Administration, Economics and Finance at the University of L’Aquila, are now available. More than a mere collection of lecture notes, this is a teaching experiment: to hold together, within a single coherent path, the “old” and the “new” in economic analysis, showing that they do not belong to separate worlds but to one and the same research tradition, which reads the capitalist economy as a monetary economy of production.
On the side of the “old”, the course retraces the history of economic thought and the classic themes of the surplus tradition, from Quesnay and Smith to Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and Sraffa: value, distribution, conflict, the reproduction of the system and the role of money. Not as erudition for its own sake, but as a key to understanding where the categories we still use today come from, and why economics keeps splitting into opposing schools of thought.
On the side of the “new”, the materials open up to the most recent strands of research, which are the direct heirs of that tradition: stock-flow consistent (SFC) models, which impose full accounting coherence between income flows and stocks of wealth; agent-based models (ABMs), in which macroeconomic regularities emerge from the interaction of many heterogeneous agents; monetary circuit theory and input-output analysis. And it pairs them with new research tools: every model comes with commented, reproducible R code, animated simulations and interactive applications, so that students can not only read the results, but actually see the mechanisms and experiment with them first-hand.
The underlying aim is not to provide ready-made answers, but to learn how to build, read and criticise economic models. All the material is freely available (also as an HTML book), is continually evolving and is released under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.
Go to the repository: github.com/marcoverpas/analisi_economica (Italian only)
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22205941.