Today’s economies fail to recognise that we are in a rapidly worsening crisis, reproducing and often worsening vast and harmful inequalities between people and countries. The current models are unsustainable, and at a time when global temperatures are rising and divides are deepening, humanity is left in a rapidly worsening situation of its own making, the destruction of the living world, which will make large parts of the earth uninhabitable.
Without access to the knowledge, skills or tools to build a better future, local, national and global economies will continue to fail to address the interlinked challenges of systemic racism, inequalities faced by women, the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate emergency.
Drawing on over sixty interviews with students and professionals from identities and backgrounds marginalised in economics and a wide range of global and historical research, this book illustrates the ways in which the discipline is currently not fit for purpose and sets out a vision for how it can be diversified, decolonised and democratised.
‘Here comes a book full of insightful challenges to the economic mindset that has been handed down through textbooks and classrooms worldwide. The authors clearly demonstrate the power of questioning and unlearning that inheritance. But they also show what it would mean to diversify, decolonise and democratise economics to make it fit for our times, and those that lie ahead. If future generations were here today, they’d surely urge us to read this book.’
Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics