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Five Minute Honours Theses

 

Each year, the Honours cohort of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney produces theses across a wide range of topics. This blog series features a selection of these from the 2017 cohort. The challenge for the Honours graduates is to condense a ~20 000 word thesis down to a 1,000 word blog post, either by attempting a general overview or selectively attending to a particular theme. One-thousand words, of course, is just about the upper limit of what can be said, and read, in five minutes.

      
 

Reflections from Honours in Political Economy

Riki Scanlan | June 26, 2018

This set of reflections concludes this series of “five minute honours theses” produced by members of the 2017 Political Economy Honours cohort. The motivation for running this series emerged from the desire to see our research and ideas reach a broader audience than a couple of markers and [...]

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Quantitative Easing and Corporate Surplus Hoarding in Contemporary Japan

Luciano Carment | May 24, 2018

In 2012, the Bank of Japan (BoJ), launched one of the largest monetary policy experiments in the history of the 21st century. Whilst in the years since the GFC, many countries have engaged in the kind of bond buy-back programs now referred to as quantitative easing (QE), Japan’s is [...]

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The Perfect Storm: How Australia Managed to Weather the Global Financial Crisis

Sean Graham | May 15, 2018

The primary function of this thesis was to analyse the Australian experience of the Global Financial Crisis and the contrasting approaches taken by the New and Post-Keynesian economic schools of thought in explaining and understanding how Australia managed to circumvent a technical [...]

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An ‘Old’ Institutional Perspective on Carbon Lock-In

Oliver Summerfield | April 26, 2018

My thesis, An ‘Old’ Institutional Perspective on Carbon Lock-In: The Case Of The Australian Electricity Sector, focused on the need for a transition to low- or zero-emissions energy systems as a key mitigation strategy in addressing anthropogenic climate change.

It focused primarily [...]

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Uber and the Future of Work

Fiona Alamyar | April 19, 2018

Platform work has been widely heralded as a liberating, progressive development that provides workers with the opportunity to become micro-entrepreneurs and enjoy the freedom and autonomy of ‘being their own boss’.

In a nutshell, my honours thesis, Future of work: Formal rights, [...]

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Technics and Transition: Australian Renewable Energy in World-Systemic Context

Andrew Brodzeli | April 12, 2018

Near-consensus about our critically ill climate and the culpability of fossil-fuels is no longer enough to compel rapid energy transition – last year, Australia’s carbon emissions rose once again. Clearly, something is amiss in how we socially organise. Relying on technological breakthrough [...]

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Hidden Women: A Feminist Critique of Poverty Measurement

Caitlin James | April 5, 2018

‘Poverty’ is one of those issues that receives extended and diverse attention globally. After all, the reduction and eradication of extreme poverty have been at the top of the global ‘development agenda’ since the 1990s. The United Nations enshrined the global community’s commitment to [...]

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When Minsky meets complexity

Kimberley Yoo | March 29, 2018

My thesis ‘Time to Rebuild and Reaggregate Fluctuations’ stands on the shoulders of giants; giants like J. Barkley Rosser Jr. and Basil Moore, who worked to close the gap between complex systems science and Post Keynesian economics. The thesis builds on this effort by using Hyman P. Minsky’s [...]

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