Heterodox Economics Newsletter

Issue 356March 09, 2026 web pdf Heterodox Economics Directory

In a certain sense this will be the most nerdy editorial that has ever had the honor to introduce an issue of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter šŸ¤–. So letā€™s get this one going!

As you might have guessed producing the Newsletter is a tedious endeavor and we could never do it with standard tools, like html-editors, tex-files or GoogleDoc. We need our own dedicated and secure database. And an algorithmic routine that transforms our database into a nicely formatted output. Together they form a Newsletter-ā€šbackendā€™ that boosts our labor productivity and thereby makes the whole project tenable, although it still remains a tough job ;-).

Hence, as so many endeavors undertaken for practical purposes the Newsletter requires a solid and reliable foundational infrastructure and for the Newsletter this has really worked out well. Back in 2013 we managed to create a ā€šbackendā€˜-system that ran stably for thirteen years and has just recently seen its first major update since its inception.

This foundational infrastructure of the Newsletter is built on reciprocity as a main provisioning logic in various ways. For one, I have been guided by Herwig Hochleitner, a friend of mine and an IT-genius, who recognized the merits of heterodox economics early on and, hence, decided to commit to provide continuous support to the Newsletter on a mainly voluntary basis. For another, Herwig and I share some fetish for creating stable services for self-hosting to facilitate digital empowerment, which materialized in this project that tries to create appropriate lightweight services for self-hosting and makes them available for free .

On top of that, all our digital infrastructure is based on nothing less than NixOS. What sounds like an obscure Linux distribution at first glance, turns out to be exactly that on closer inspection šŸ˜‚. But it is a beautiful and empowering form of obscurity: not only is NixOS a commons in its best sense ā€“ free to use & replicate, community-driven and decentralized ā€“, but it also puts the user back into the driverā€™s seat.

On standard OS, like Windows or MacOS, many core system settings are hidden from the user or can only be modified in selective ways via precomposed menus. In NixOS, in contrast, you will write one single code-file, which exactly specifies the whole setup of your machine and gives you truly full control of what you are doing. While this is sometimes complicated and tricky (but donā€™t worry, NixOS is prepared to catch your errors before rebooting ;-)), it gives an immensely empowering feeling and, for me personally, it reminds me of my 12-year old self, who tried to hack the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS of MS-DOS 6.22 machine to finally get some computer game to runā€¦

As you see the Newsletter is not only a commons-based provisioning system in itself, it also builds on other such community-based provisioning system as a foundational infrastructure. Both examples illustrate that digital space is just another spatial dimension, where different logics of provisioning compete: the logic of market exchange in the form of large digital tech monopolies already colonized large parts of this space, whereas community-based, open services building on the logic of reciprocity stay ready to re-craft digital space as something empowering, open and accessible.

Such digital commons, like NixOs or the Heterodox Economics Newsletter, are driven by belief, trust, friendship, cooperation and a passion for getting the job done instead of a commodifying profit motive. Often it is our choice as users, which way to go. The Newsletter-Team opts for community-based solution and emancipatory self-hosting and is ready to accept the occasional calamities that might come with such an approach ;-).

Many academic environments rely on proprietary services instead that often fall behind open and community-based solution in terms of quality ā€“ not to speak of cost-effectiveness. We all could put more effort into changing that ā€“ and build and use solutions that more truly live up to the commons-based logic that underpins all scientific effort.

All the best šŸ–„ļøšŸ’¾

Jakob

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