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Devika Dutt et al., "Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction" (Polity Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Good morning. This is the New Books Network, and My name is Dr. Zachary Williams and I am your host. And today we have a great privilege to be able to speak to one of the authors of Decolonizing Economics, Dr. Ingrid Pavold Kavingraven Graven. Wonderful. Well, it is wonderful to be able to have the chance to talk with you, and it's great to be able to explore your work along with your colleagues of Decolonizing Economics, which gets at the sort of central thesis that mainstream economics is not neutral or universal, but offers a Eurocentric, historically rooted discipline that naturalizes inequality and ignores the role of historical episodes such as colonialism, racial capitalism, and power in characterizing and calculating global economic measures. And you also, you and your colleagues argue it's a structural and epistemic transformation which you're calling for and moving away from sort of a largely mathematical analysis, computational analysis, as it relates to classical neoclassical thought that doesn't include Global south and other alternative perspectives, and opens the door for questions of power and hierarchy and other related subjects that show the interrelationship of countries, nations, people and perspectives. So, professor, it is wonderful to be able to meet you and I'd just like to ask you if you could just talk about book that you and your colleagues wrote and what brought you to write it, and just to kind of give us an overview from your particular perspective and position of what you all were seeking to accomplish.
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Yeah, thank you so much and thanks for having me. I listen to this podcast, so it's really cool to also have an invitation to be on it. So what we did so this is the book that I've written with Devika Dutt, Serbi Kesar and Carolina Alves. And we know each other from PhD days. So we go way back and we had before we even started thinking about publications post PhD and the book or anything, we were all working within traditions, within economics that were heterodox, so that were already not mainstream. But we were also concerned with issues of the Global south. And we were also concerned with, or we were seeing that there were issues of what we would later conceptualize as Eurocentrism within heterodoxy, within heterodox economics. So even neglect of certain important topics and also a Global south centered scholarship. So we found each other through these kinds of young scholars workshops and things. And eventually we actually started a network called Diversifying and Decolonizing Economics, Decon which still exists, which you can look up. And it was after we started this that we then actually got an invitation from Polity Press to write a book about decolonizing economics. And this is a series. So they'd already done Decolonizing Sociology and Decolonizing Politics was coming out. So. And now there's been a lot more that have come out as well. So we then saw this actually as like a really good opportunity to get together and think about what it actually means to decolonize economics. So that was kind of the background of how it came about. And then we started working on it and it took a while to work through everything. And of course we build on a long tradition of anti colonial, anti imperialist, non Eurocentric scholarship and apply it to basically modern economics. So a key aspect of our argument is this concept of Eurocentrism which we link to the idea of capitalism. So basically what it means is a Eurocentric idea of capitalism is one that sees capitalism as an economic system that developed in Europe as something that was internal to Europe, based on hard work, technological improvements, certain cultural traits, things that were about the Europeanness of the economy, also linked to the Enlightenment, things like that. So this is Eurocentric because first of all, it completely neglects the actual violent transformation of social relations that had to do with that was essential for capitalism. It wasn't just a kind of increase of markets or increased rationalization. It actually was a completely new system that was put into place that involved dispossession of peasantry and exploitation of labor. So that's one aspect that the Eurocentric story hides. And the other aspect is that capitalism from the beginning was also a global system. It wasn't just a national system. So in the Eurocentric story, you can imagine that the European model of just good institutions, hard work, improved technology, can be exported to the global south, and any country in the world can just follow these steps and you can have all countries in the world being highly industrialized, developed economies. So this doesn't take into account the fact that actually the colonialism played a role and transatlantic slave trade was important. All these global processes were also a part of the development of capitalism. And if you take this into account, then it becomes much harder to think about how countries in the global south that actually play a very particular role in the global system can follow the same recipe or the same kind of policies that this Eurocentric story suggests. So what we argue is that this is a kind of implicit backdrop within economics. From the early 1900s, there was this Eurocentric foundation for the discipline as it evolved. And it's never explicit because economists generally don't even tend to name capitalism. They just talk about the economic system. But it's there, lurking in the background, and you can unpack it. And that's what we tried to do. Basically. The rest of the book is about reflecting on what are the different ways that this can be seen in mainstream economics, in heterodox economics, to some extent, in development economics? What is the implication for understanding colonialism, for understanding racialization, for understanding inequality in general? And what would a radical decolonization agenda look like?
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It's interesting. You and your colleagues have done an incredible job of, you know, shifting sort of the. Sort of the, you know, sort of the plane of conversation where it has been, you know, traditionally and at a time where, you know, social, global social events are sort of, you know, overlapping and coming into sort of ever increasing, you know, sort of, you know, interrelationship. As they have always been on some level. But to where this sort of recalibrating and repositioning at a time where you're calling for more urgency in sort of examining economics as it relates to matters like global inequality, climate change and racial capitalism, broadly speaking, but particularly as it relates to colonial rule extraction, continuing extraction, slavery and the interrelationship among all those and across a global sort of spectrum. And at your core, core it's saying economics must confront its imperial past and its evolution, which positions itself as being methodologically neutral. But it's highly ideologically and agenda driven and it's rooted in prioritizing and privileging western positions in a world that is global and has, as you talk about the global north, we talk about the global north and global south before third World. But also that's in relationship to what's perceived as first world. But there's this interrelationship as it relates to markets, economics, the metrics of economics, markets, resources and things of that nature. But it's been seen also as the sort of the elder and more privileged subject area of other subject areas. People see it as more economics is more sort of unbiased and objective and having more credibility. But it obscures the people centered character of sort of social evolution that are measured in numbers and mathematical computation. So can you talk about that? It's sort of structural. Continue to talk about it. Structure, sort of character and how it has evolved and what your and your colleagues work is sort of the larger tradition it's in has been calling for a recalibrating and analysis of not only the position of economics, but its content and its character.
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Yeah, great, great set of questions. So I think, yeah, as you said, you know, the economics discipline is often seen as like the most rigorous, the most objective, the queen of the social sciences, the most scientific, which is very frustrating when you try to argue about economic policy. But I think this goes back to basically when disciplines were formed in the early 1900s and there was basically split. You had economics go one way, sociology another, anthropology another. Just move away from what was a political economy before that. And then from then onwards you basically have the development of economics as this kind of scientific quote unquote discipline where it's largely based on modeling. I mean, you can have. There are within. I don't want to make it sound like it's the modeling itself that is necessarily the issue because you can have different kinds of models and different assumptions, but the modeling that was basically based on this neoclassical economic foundation that was developed in the early 1900s, or at least solidified and consolidated in the early 1900s, was based on these assumptions of first methodological individualism, which is basically the idea that the world is made up of lots of different actors rather than structures. So it's about this led to a focus on the rational economic man, as they call it in economics discipline, where behavior is basically something that's individual. And also the kind of sister concept of methodological individualism is methodological nationalism, which is basically that the world is made up of countries that are individual units that you can analyze on their own, not in relation to the global structure. So basically a removal of this structural elements that bind people together and that binds countries together, which laid the foundation then for a very particular kind of modeling where you basically have, for example, a representative agent. So that is one kind of very foundational aspect of the economics discipline that is usually not problematized in the discipline. Because when, if you open an economics textbook or the most sort of popular ones, Mankiw or Samuelsson, you'll see that they'll teach you how to think like an economist and the basic laws of economics and not reveal to you that these are highly theoretically contested. Keynes was also an economist who disagreed with a lot of the neoclassical assumptions. And of course there's Marxist economics is a big, big literature, big tradition that's still very active postcolonial capitalist development literature, dependency theory. There's so many different theoretical frameworks within economics that are completely neglected within the mainstream. You only have this neoclassical and extensions of it and sort of deviations from it. Because eventually in the 70s there was a recognition that a rational economic actor didn't actually, didn't actually capture how people behave. And at the same time there was also a recognition that markets don't actually operate perfectly. So therefore you have the introduction of things like imperfect markets, imperfect information, and also the rise of behavioral economics, which is more recent, where basically it's about figuring out how people's behavior deviates from the rational economic actor. So it's kind of solving some of the issues, but at the same time not in a way that actually allows us to see the structural, structural problems. So that's one aspect, the methodological individualism and nationalism aspect that the models are built on. The other thing is that the focus is on the market based interactions and institutions that support them. So it's about consumers, it's about producers, firms, individuals, and not about the social relations that actually shape how these firms produce the relationship between capital and labor. So it kind of remains at a more superficial level than the critique of political economy, for example. And then there is this de politicization of theory itself because it's seen as just like a framework, a toolkit to answer questions. And this relates to what you were saying about how is it possible that they economics is presented as such a rigorous, objective science. Well, the depoliticization is a big part of it that they give you basically an analysis that is presented as something that's neutral, that's not based on a very, very specific kind of theory. So in development economics, for example, you have economists like for example, Esther Duflo, who basically says that economists should be like plumbers, they should go in, analyze the problem, and then come up with a solution. So it's basically a completely depoliticized version of something that economists usually trace their lineage to Adam Smith and classical political economy, but it's a completely depoliticized version of that. So I think that's really important to kind of show because a lot of people that just listen to the radio or read the news and hear the opinions of economic experts don't necessarily know about these debates that are happening behind the scenes. Or at least, I mean, the mainstream economists aren't necessarily engaging in those debates because they tend to ignore the critiques, which makes it even harder to actually make it known that these debates exist. Yeah, so I think that's a key issue with economics discipline. And I think one more thing to say on that is just that I think the fact that Eurocentrism arose in the 18 and 1900s as a way to legitimize capitalism is also one of the. And the fact that the economic discipline is among the most Eurocentric is also one of the reasons why the economics discipline is so powerful. So there's also this power and ideology aspect to it, which I think is important in terms of thinking about how to actually change it. It's not about just convincing individual economists, but actually there's a structural reason why the economics discipline actually is so powerful and is the way that it is.
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Yeah, it's a fascinating conversation. There's so much to talk about and thank you for unpacking that in an incredible, brilliant way. So the shift as we talk about even conversations around structural systems like the imf, the World bank, where that economics that's university based and sort of scholarly rooted, is that scholarship that informs those who become policy analysts, practitioners and sort of thought leaders in those particular areas of the relationships and the ongoing interrelationships between coloniality, colonial rule, neocolonial rule, continuing extraction that's still inseparable from that. And it's part of the larger conversations of racial capitalism. But of course, with labels and particular labels of groups from the Global south or from marginalized or stigmatized groups, there's been this sort of, sort of, you know, separation and distancing. You know, like you said, that doesn't even treat that as being reputable or having value. But you know, all institutions and systems and groups are interrelated even in those power systems. Right. So, so it's impossible to separate that and then have accurate analysis. But still there's that claim for accurate analysis.
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Good.
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And could you speak to the interrelationship of racial capitalism, you know, like particularly with the Global south and cross slavery, colonial rule extraction and how it also influences other subsets like as you mentioned, behavioral economics, to where even in industry, groups and subjects are still seen as colonial entities within sort of industrial projects and even through independence, they still have that sort of veneer and perception of, as you say, with Global south perspective seen as backward or insufficient or not as valid. So how does, how does all of that, you know, sort of continue to accumulate, you know, cachet, you know, in our sort of modern era for such a long time? I mean, it seems like it's a struggle you know, just to try to get other perspectives a part of it. So your work, you and your colleagues work is groundbreaking in a lot of ways.
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Thank you. Yeah. Another very big question that we try to grapple with in the book. So we have in the second part of the book, we talk about what would, after analyzing everything that's wrong with economics, we talk about what would a radical decolonization agenda actually look like and how would that change how we see inequalities in the world, like racialized inequalities, patriarchy, colonial hierarchies, et cetera. And then we draw on a lot of black Marxism, Marxist feminist theory, third world Marxism, lots of different strands, to basically say that decolonizing economics isn't just about adding certain topics, but actually analyzing how power shapes economic outcomes in a structural manner. Because especially now past, say decade or so, the economics discipline has actually started to take things like race a lot more seriously. But they do it in a way that's very problematic. And same with colonialism, at least the past two decades or so. You can't anymore say that the mainstream of the discipline doesn't deal with colonialism, because it does. It's just that it does in a very, very problematic way. So basically what we argue bring these different traditions together to try to analyze different kinds of hierarch, is that in order to have a non Eurocentric view of the world of uneven development, you need to. Yeah, first of all, as I mentioned, theorize in a way that can actually uncover structural power relations. And making that kind of vantage point of theorization very clear. Making this clear is a way of repoliticizing, but also making actually analysis more rigorous. And this is also like we're trying to take back this idea of rigor because economists argue that rigor has to do with the specific kind of model, model and mathematical precision. But what they do is that they are not explicit about their theoretical vantage point, which is quite problematic. So then that would then allow us to think about how underdevelopment in one part of the world, or marginalization even within a country between certain groups is connected to the global capitalist system. Underdevelopment in one place is connected development elsewhere. Marginalization is connected to domination. And capitalist development does actually produce these dichotomies and this unevenness, it creates colonial hierarchies, it creates and reinforces racial hierarchies and patriarchal hierarchies as well. So maybe I can give an example on colonial and racial. So in terms of the colonial hierarchies, basically it's really interesting that Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson won the Nobel in Economics a couple years ago for their work. They have a popular book called why Nations Fail. And they also have this very important quantitative article that has huge amount of citations called Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, where they basically look at how different ways that countries were colonized. So they look at the places where the colonizers settled. So that would be US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. And they think of that as like inclusive institutions being established in those countries. And then they think about the places where the colonizers didn't settle, which is large parts of the global south today. And they argue that in those countries extractive institutions were established because basically the colonizers just wanted to extract resources and goods that were produced with cheap Labor. Whereas the U.S. canada, New Zealand and Australia, the settlers actually had an incentive to create institutions that would be good for them when they live there. So basically the good institutions that they're talking about are basically institutions of private property rights. And so the kind of implication of this is basically that countries then need to develop better property rights. They're countries that currently have extractive institutions. So the problem with this and the reason that we argue that this is still Eurocentric is that it's still methodologically nationalist. It doesn't see how these countries, that there was a relationship between countries in one place of the world and countries in others, and there was uneven, which generated uneven development. It only looks at institutions within a country. So it's a very internalist analysis. It doesn't include colonialism in the theory of capitalism. It keeps the same theory, the same kind of idea of how capitalism evolves, but it just brings in institutions as a kind of shock, exogenous shock. And it also ignores the relationship between places with inclusive institutions and places with extractive institutions. Because of course, as we know, the places with extractive institutions where these goods were extracted to global north generally. And of course, importantly, they also ignore the violence of inclusive institutions because there were genocides and other things happening in the places where, where the Europeans settled in North America, for example. So they were not that inclusive, even though they generated capitalist development of a particular kind. So there was a lack of understanding of social relations there that underpinned capitalism as a global system. So therefore, I think this is a good example of thinking about how, okay, even when the economics discipline deals with colonialism, they do it in a way that actually takes us back to the same kind of policy prescriptions of develop better institutions to support market development. And nothing about challenging the global institutions, like you mentioned IMF and the World bank. The ways that these global structures actually reproduce uneven development isn't a part of the. The issue. And similarly, the way that economists deal with racialized hierarchies, for example, is that they kind of. There's this idea of like, the rational actor that is often assumed to be male, white. Yeah. And then anything that's like a deviation is seen as like something that you can correct for. So there's some scholarship that has analyzed the way that economists look at race, where often they call the methodological framework that the economists use white methods. So it's a way of kind of not seeing race, even when trying to deal with race. Where it becomes often in the U.S. say, okay, why analyze specific employment outcomes or education outcomes between different racial groups? And the implication is often, okay, there's something lacking in the marginalized groups and that needs to be fixed. Okay, is that because they don't have as much access to skilling? And again, it becomes these kind of very simple fixes, rather than thinking about how marginalization and racialization have been processes that have been going on with the development of capitalism since the beginning of the. Of capitalism and the transatlantic slave trade, where racialization was actually produced as a structure that actually benefits capitalism and certain groups in structural ways, which isn't captured with this very kind of individualistic method of just looking at, okay, what is the employment outcome, what is the educational outcome? And by doing this, they end up actually also reinforcing racism to some extent, because it's like, oh, the problem is that this group doesn't have enough schooling, so it becomes a lock within the group rather than a problem with the structure. So the economics discipline kind of naturalizes the hierarchies in a certain way and also suggests to us that there is something that can be fixed just with sort of simple policy interventions. You also saw, you've seen economists do kind of experiments as well, randomized controlled trials, which is very big. They do it a lot in the global south, but also in the global North. And there was one trial that was in, I think, 2020 or 2021, where they tried to address the issue of police violence against racialized minorities by seeing what would happen to the behavior of individual police officers if they wore a body cam. So it's again, it's like thinking that the issue is the individual police officers rather than the structure of the police force, which is related to the structure of the state and capitalism. So it leads to very problematic policy conclusions.
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It's interesting when you're talking about the overlapping character, those hierarchies and systems of power that involve different types and levels of identity, gender, race, racial, class, caste, class and caste. And so the interesting sort of, you know, qualitative you know, analysis of not only those systems that are sort of like yin and yang of sorts, caste and class, or the sort of, you know, symbiosis of sorts, people can evolve, you know, systems and people can, can move through or not move through, you know, castes and class or become sort of, you know, stuck in a particular position as maybe you've characterized with India and South Africa. But there's also the people oriented character to it where, you know, you have a Mohandis Gandhi who is, you know, trained as a barrister in, you know, you know, South Africa goes to India. But those experiences overlap. And so now of course you have these conversations among the global south that are calling into question like, you know, the president of Ghana went before the United nations, there was a vote about, you know, calling attention to slavery as the crime against genocide, the worst in, you know, history. And the interesting part of this, the vote of those who abstain, but also those who voted no. But perhaps the more interesting character is those who vote no. So the hidden sort of character and there's that language in economics like what's the Adam Smith, the hidden hand. The market will calibrate itself, everything. It's seen as again being sort of objective and non biased and but they are real people and real actors that both shape, you know, systems and positions and have perspectives that influence, you know, happenings. And also they're real people who are trying to, you know, push back and counter systems and are sort of, you know, in their work and their labor and praxis are, you know, are sort of showing the sort of the, you know, the sort of the social and cultural character of economics. And here in the United States there's the conversation about kitchen table issues and you know, it's economics like, you know, one of our theorists, James Carville, you know, talks about economics, you know, that should be focused on. But there are people behind those numbers and people like to quantify people in such a way to where it ignores and isolates and obscures what real people feel, need and experience. And there's this privileging of this hidden, this free that is, you know, like blind, you know, and it's true, it's true injustice. It's true in other areas and disciplines too. And it's what you, and you are saying, you're saying that is this way in which people are not trying to examine what is complex and even also what is simple and what is complex and how real people are not going along to get along, that they have positions that even in positions where power seems to be in other hands, they are questioning and challenging in everyday simple acts that may or may not, you know, find its way into ivory ebony towers. And so, for instance, the work of scholars like Sandy Darity and Kirsten Mullins are talking about in the United States, how do we rectify and address that, you know, and all these different measures, you know, the structural adjustment we're seeing to be, you know, as, you know, as being, you know, viable and fair, but it still keeps inequality in place. And so unless you have restitution and redistributive justice like Dr. King, you know, called for and even, you know, as the conversation around reparations in the United States and globally and even in other countries, like what's happening with Iran and Gaza are calling for, if you, you, you break it, you own it, but, you know, but it's also, it's also the possession of other people who actually have been extracted and along with, you know, domestic, you know, colonial rule in various places in an interrelated system. So is economics valuable and viable unless it attends to those voices and people that are also part of the conversation, the everyday lived reality and measures that seek to right wrongs? I mean, can we talk about economics as an authoritative area unless that is so? And is that the scholarship, the thought leadership having a major role to play in shifting public opinion and public conversation? And how do you make it more public to where it's not just something that, you know, that, you know, a lot of us, we talk about, but that the general public, it resonates in relation to general public's angst and issues and even, you know, people's lethargy and how they become, you know, you know, sort of, you know, you know, bored with following positions and perspectives that don't identify and examine their, you know, their position. So I said, how do we assess that as we, you know, project and make, you know, this position more public? Because, you know, our space, the New Books Network, is about making public scholarship, you know, relevant. So taking you all's work, giving you the space and platform to talk to everyday people who are scholarly, who are thoughtful, who have a broad array of, you know, of credentials and education whatnot, but who are interested in relating reading, scholarship books to, you know, to making sense of their own situation. So, so how did you all work fit within that sort of broader conversation?
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Yeah, great, great question. So I guess there's, it's important to differentiate between, there's the mainstream economics discipline that basically is there to obscure complex issues and to obscure social relations, which makes it hard for regular people to connect with it because, you know, and especially people that are not sort of a white man. Because how do you, you know, if you think that if you're, if you hear from like economics, economics textbooks that people are rational, that wages are fair, you get what you, you know, you get. Your wage is basically based on the effort that you put in the world is meritocratic, all these myths, if you've experienced sexism or racism, casteism, you're less likely to actually identify that kind of narrative. Right? And I think that there is. So there, I mean, there is a big part of the economics discipline that is heterodox. That is, you know, you mentioned standidarity. I don't know if he identifies as heterodox, but, you know, I would consider him to be broadly within the tradition of heterodox economics where the discussion is much more about power imbalances, class exploitation, you know, the conflict between labor and capital, and also trying to think about how capitalism actually produces unevenness, inequality. And there's different ways of dealing with this. And you have, of course, different strands, possibly stratification economics could be included there. Keynesian, Marxist, institutionalist, feminist that have been picked up in some of, like for example, Bernie Sanders used some heterodox ideas to try to communicate his messages. The same with Jeremy Corbyn in the uk. So there are these ideas that are potentially more relatable to marginalized groups that at the moment are actually going more towards Trump. And in the UK it's towards reform and this authoritarian type leaders across the globe now that people that have been marginalized are moving towards because of the marginalization of actually heterodox ideas that. And the left as well. So I think that's an important thing to think about in terms of communicating economics. There are different ways of doing it that aren't within the mainstream. And I think another thing to think about, basically when you started talking about, You started with the reparations vote in the UN Right, which is interesting because I feel like we're also in a different moment now where these debates between heterodox and mainstream were happening, been happening forever. But when they were going on in sort of the 1990s, 2000s, the liberal economic order was much stronger and the violence of it was Harder to make clear to people it wasn't so obvious to everyone that the world was so unequal and so unfair. The IMF was playing a negative role. You mentioned structural adjustment programs that of course have had structurally very violent outcomes in the global south, including increasing poverty. The current moment, basically what's happening is that that kind of liberal international economic order that was also Eurocentric and also not good for the global South. It's becoming clear that the US Is imperialist. For example, you know, Trump doesn't hide these things. It's becoming clear that the US Was supporting genocide in Palestine. And it's becoming very clear. You had, you know, Trump just dropping bombs on schools in Iran in a, in a way that he doesn't even try to legitimize it. You know, in the past, you would have, like Bush tried really hard to legitimize why he was bombing Iraq, saying it was, oh, you know, because of weapons of mass destruction. Trump doesn't seem to care that much to be bothered too much by like, convincing the American electorate about, like, why this is important from, like a liberal perspective. He's just much more open about his imperialist goals. He just wants the oil and he wants to challenge China, and he's just open about it. So in a sense, this could be a moment where these sort of structural inequalities and the power dynamics should become a bit more obvious to people. So it could be an opening for politicians, activists, social movements that are actually making the arguments against imperialism to show that, you know, this is not something that we're making up. It's not a conspiracy theory. These things are happening. But of course, we also do see that a lot of the establishment, the liberal establishment is kind of trying to position or like, say that Trump is kind of an aberration. So if only we go back to the Democrats, things would be better. Or maybe, maybe they would be better. But, you know, there would still be. We shouldn't forget that it was Biden who actually carried out the support for the genocide in Palestine from the US side. So it's not just an issue of Trump. Right. So I think there are these changes that are happening at the moment that are making it possible to talk about things that were kind of fringe before in terms of empire and genocide.
- [42:18]
B
Yeah, and it's interesting, you know, that kind of relates to what you all were talking about in chapter four when you're talking about developmental as a way to kind of address global inequality, but yet it sort of kept sort of those Eurocentric based views and Western centered views and it even perceived the global south as backwards. So even when there's an effort to try to make some inroads, still there's this overall veneer, this, this larger specter that perceives particular groups as being, you know, sort of less than. And it shows this interrelated, you know, character and nature. But economics, as it sort of is a sort of a lens on sort of, you know, social, global, social, local and national, social and cultural life also is sort of beholden to sort of the, the pushes and pulls of global cultural and social life. Right. So even, you know, you have these long conversations about, you know, contests for civilization or, you know, you know, long standing inequality and of particular groups within, you know, sectors of society. But you know, what King had oftentimes talked about was the sort of, sort of inescapable web of mutuality, you know, the single garment of destiny, which is a very basic working class, everyday people sort of analogy. But it talks about from a basic position, what most people understand in relationship to their labor, their work and its relationship to, to, to other people and places and institutions and how, you know, it's interesting to see how an institution, institutions, you know, like again, you know, governments or countries or businesses and the like can adopt particular perspectives that will be advantageous for them. And how again, this scholar analysis over time can evolve to undergird and support that. And what it seems like you all are suggesting that a counter to that also is taking place as well, that presence matters, that if people's perspectives and voices are valued as much as others, then becomes a conversation and a competition of sort of equal weight where, you know, it's like in a good debate you're trying to, which, you know, academia and scholar communities are supposed to be based on that you bring your position, we bring ours, and best position wins. And whoever, you know, ascribes those positions, then, you know, they choose, you know, what positions they want to follow. But there's been a lot of interfering and meddling, as I know, you know, one scholar talked about with regard to the development of the IMF and World bank, you know, at different levels, even in characterizing and defining, you know, what is valuable and what is pertinent. And so, you know, how structurally and institutionally, how do you see, you all, see you all's work as being able to counter and catch that wave that is in conversation with global movements to push back against sweatshops and exploitation of women workers in different parts of the world, even as corporations and companies that are Fortune 500 and the like are making billions and trillions off of labor. And how that's happened over time, but also how that intersects with and overlaps with global climate change. And not just conversations about it, but the realities of it. That war, just like oil spills in Gulf states and other things, influences the environment, but also the soil and affects people. But it's all interrelated. And those assume they can escape, get away to another country or go into space or wherever. At every level there's an interrelationship. And so unless we attend to what happens to particular groups, it's going to affect all at some particular point in time. There's still this belief, as it seems in some sectors of economics, that people can ignore that and separate themselves enough from that. And what you all seem to be calling for is that it's not only right, but it's also academically and scholarly sound to reflect upon and consider these traditions and these perspectives, because in the long run, everyone is involved and interrelated. And so it's inescapable to assume that people can hold positions that don't give equal weight and measure and value to other physicians who are intimately involved. So are you all. How do you see that and how do you see all in your conversations with others and even talks, some of the conversation taking place around those particular perspectives?
- [47:10]
A
Yeah, I think development economics as a discipline is a good illustration for thinking about several of the things that you were saying. For example, this sort of way that the sub discipline developed with resistance. There was a lot of resistance from movements in the global south. And they have always shaped development economics in different ways. And what we found interesting, because we have a whole chapter on that, as you mentioned, because we wanted to think about how. Because often when we speak to mainstream economists, they're like, oh, but this is development economics. And development economics does deal with these issues. And again, we want to say, well, actually they deal with it. The mainstream of the development economics discipline deal with it in a very problematic way. And even though there's a lot of scholarship now that shows how the origins of development economics were very colonial, and that's kind of. Well, that's accepted even in the mainstream, that during colonialism, the way that colonialism was carried out with support of economists as well was explicitly racialized. And there were all this racialized language that is not used to the same extent by mainstream economists. Now you have people like Trump maybe using it, but it's within the economic system when it's been like sanitized and when sort of when colonialism ended or when it was about to end. There was this opening of, okay, what will development economics look like now? You know, is this. There's a chance for like sovereignty for developing countries that are now becoming independent. And there were a lot of scholars and activists and politicians also in the Global south pushing for specific ways of thinking about development. And they're pushing for it in the un. They're pushing for it in meetings like with the US for example, in negotiating treaties. And there was this moment where the mainstream looked a little bit more open to the idea that developing countries could sort of chart their own way. And there was that recognition among also Global north kind of developmentalist economist who were not just seeing Global south countries as like spaces to extract from, but were actually saying, okay, how can you have industry in the Global south given that there is this colonial structure that has been produced through colonialism. So there was this recognition that you need, okay, maybe you need industrial policy, you need specific kinds of investments in order to develop industry, you need big eight packages, things like that. So that was a kind of opening and an acceptance of the idea that the structures of developing countries are different from structures of Global north countries because of colonialism. So this was, I'm talking about like 40s, 50s, 60s, with economists like Arthur Lewis, Hirschman, Rosenstein, Roden that were advising governments like Arthur Lewis advised in Krumah in Ghana, for example, and they were advising the UN as well. So there was this moment of opening within mainstream spaces as well. But even this opening was still a bit Eurocentric to some degree, because the policies that were proposed were very often national, nationally based on coming again back to this idea of methodological nationalism, that it wasn't about challenging the global structure as a whole or thinking about how, for example, Ghana played a particular role in the global structure which Nkrumah would see, would make things very difficult, would make industrialization in Ghana very difficult. So there were some limitations to that kind of developmentalist policy. But at the same time, this was something that was being contested, debated in Latin America. You had the UN organizations pushing for developmentalism sepel, but you also had dependency theory critiquing it. And these were lively debates at the time. Then you have a kind of turn a way like where neoclassical economics becomes more dominant in the economics discipline especially. And of course the economics discipline impacts development agencies a lot. So you basically have this move away from developmentalism towards neoclassical economics for everyone. So basically there isn't a different. So the new consensus that emerged in the 80s didn't allow for the idea that actually Global south countries are structurally different, so they might actually need a different kind of national program, different kinds of investments, different kinds of policies. Instead it became about, okay, how can we identify what's lacking in the Global south in terms of institutions, in terms of people not acting rationally. We need to nudge them, maybe give them some incentives to vaccinate their children. It became much more about these very narrow questions that were about behavior, institutions and markets rather than industry. Structural transformation, these big questions, of course that's always been contested, but the economics discipline became much more powerful in the 1980s and 1990s. And this also had to do with the purge of heterodox scholars that was happening during the Cold War where economics Marxists and Keynesians basically were pushed out of economics departments and the economics discipline became much more just purely neoclassical, with a few exceptions. So that has then led to this. We basically argue that it's a turn back to a colonial kind of economics, very Eurocentric economics, which pretends to be technical, neutral and just about fixing, helping people out of poverty. But really it serves to camouflage the underlying unequal structures and the actual differences between the Global south and Global north, which make it impossible for, for development to happen in the way that economists imagine in the Global south based on just sort of small tweaks and institutional fixes. And that's a very particular development. Economics as a subdiscipline is a very particular case, but you can see this kind of logic in all the different sub disciplines as well. Like environmental economics, for example. You mentioned climate change. Again, the economists tend to reduce problems with the environment down to problems with the market. The market isn't pricing environmental destruction well enough. So you need to kind of have better models to tax corporations or to regulate them, rather than to see climate change as this structural unstable system that also produces extremely unequal outcomes for people in different parts of the world, with the Global south of course being hardest hit. So that's one topic that we talk about a little bit in the book, but I think that's actually something that needs to be developed more in terms of thinking about an anti colonial approach to climate change. I mean, I know other scholars are working on this, but the economics discipline hasn't engaged with these kinds of questions enough.
- [55:21]
B
And Dr. It's interesting. How much does it count to have different perspectives and people from groups that oftentimes are not included, to be authors and researchers and scholars and offer analysis about these positions, like for instance, groups from particular class and caste Backgrounds becoming scholars, women who oftentimes are not included in those conversations, who are centerpiece of, have been centerpiece of global economy for centuries to become now authors and thought leaders and scholars. And to get in these spaces of conversation in helping to craft and shape research, theory as well as practice and policy in companies, in corporations, you know, the IMF and Lagarde, you know, the World bank and even, you know, prime ministers like Mia Motley, who bring attention to climate change and loss and damage, you know, and become, you know, leaders within their own countries, but also within their own regions like Hierarchal and you know, and even, you know, within, you know, you know, broader global conversations, you know, and some like Irving, like Ramaphosas, Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, you know, heading the sort of what is the G8, you know, in South Africa, playing a role with, you know, leaders like Lula and President Lula in Brazil. But so the complicated character that also aligns with other groups, other nations like Russia and, you know, and even China and some of the complicated nature of the non aligned Movement as a sort of a counterweight to the post World War II liberal international order that has very complicated characters you all talking about. And it can also speak to, particularly for students and other people who don't see the interrelationship between theory and practice. And even everyday people everyday live reality and these conversations happening in the halls of academia and ivory towers and ebony towers in Europe, in the United States and you know, where they are in Africa and Asia, where, particularly in parts of Africa, structurally, you know, there, there's a need more to have institutions and of higher learning to have those conversations because, you know, the infrastructure was not necessarily, you know, built to, you know, to, to, to retool and build Africa to scale as compared to what, you know, what extraction does, takes those resources and uses it for building other placements. So what does those packages look like of rectifying and providing restitution and just overarchingly coming with a work of scholarship that is so profound and groundbreaking based on what a lot of people know, but it is captured and situated and put together in a thoughtful and scholarly intellectual way. But that's because of those who come to the table who oftentimes have not been the major thinkers and all. And does it signal a shift to where more voices and people who come from particular marginalized backgrounds or spaces that have gotten as much broader attention that there's going to be a bigger wave of folk who, going into economics, talking about developed economics as a Result of of you all's work. Students who become scholars in schools of thought that become then leaders that become figures on a local, state, global, national level across the world. And will that over time help to continue to shift that conversation to then become more than just a conversation in particular spaces, but a conversation that has traction to change actual social conditions that affect everyone.
- [59:24]
A
Great. We had a lot of discussions about this. And in a way, I think, because on the one hand you can say that, well, there are certain social movements that are clearly connected to theoretical traditions and also identity. So you have black radical tradition emerged, mostly black scholars analyzing capitalism and racialization. You have feminist economics, mostly women that are analyzing patriarchy, that emerged partly with feminist activists. You have dependency theory in the Global south, which mostly emerged in the Global south, which was able to uncover some of the structural inequalities that scholars in the Global north often didn't see. So there is this element of identity and positionality that's important in terms of these kind of big theoretical frameworks that are important for uncovering certain kinds of inequality. And when we first started thinking about these issues, we did see that there is a big problem of diversity in the economic discipline. No question about it. It's sexist, it's racist, it's elitist, it's anti Global south scholarship and scholarship. But then we're very careful about reducing the issue to diversity because there is like, with the incredible dominance of the economics discipline globally. You see so many Global south scholars that are thoroughly Eurocentric and a lot of Nobel Prize winners in economics, the few of them that are from the Global south, very, very Eurocentric, and often, sometimes it's even worse in the Global south than in the Global north because the way that the institutions are structured and the incentive structures as well. So we argue that the lack of diversity in the economics discipline, which is a problem because it's exclusive and it's structurally racist and sexist and all these things, but it can't be solved through fixing the diversity issue alone. So it needs to. There's the power dynamics in theory, and that impacts how the economics discipline is hegemonic. That needs to be addressed in order for. That needs to be addressed before you can have more fair structures and diversity within the discipline. So the diversity problem is more in the economic system. It's more a reflection of how exclusive the economics discipline is. So focusing on diversity alone would actually lead us to a position where you have, I mean, you already have that in the economics discipline. Like lots of women that are saying very that are reproducing theoretical frameworks that are basically gender blind, that are just reproducing things like, oh, women need to just be incorporated into the capitalist system, better work harder, have more skills. And that's so being a woman in itself, when you're put into that structure doesn't help. It just then makes the discipline seem more open because you have people that look different within the discipline, but it actually doesn't solve the issue. So, you know, whether what someone looks like doesn't necessarily matter when they're, you know, the head of the, the wto, for example, you have a Nigerian woman head of the WTO which is pushing same kinds of policies that heads of the WTO were pushing before her because it's a structure. So just changing the people doesn't matter on its own. But of course, diversity is something that is extremely unjust and a reflection of the very powerfully, a powerfully exclusive discipline that is meant to serve a very particular purpose. Yeah, so we're very kind of, we, I think we start the book with the diversity issue, but then we like walk, walk the reader through why actually this isn't an issue that is rooted in diversity, even though it's reflected in a lack of diversity. Does that make sense?
- [63:49]
B
Well, thank you for speaking. Thank you for speaking to that because oftentimes, as Fanon would say, you know, with regard to, you know, not only wretched the earth, but black skin, white mass, there's this conditioning and socializing that can happen under particular systems that can sort of, you know, duplicate, you know, those who may, you know, look in a particular type of way in alliance with particular groups or sort of embody particular, sort of, you know, you know, particular cultural, social, you know, or identity sort of positions or perspectives or sort of realities, but may also regurgitate or reify positions that are not sort of based in liberatory, holistic, sort of open and comprehensive analysis. So thanks, thanks for speaking to that. And that, of course, leads to more conversation about back and forth about how to make it more open and equitable and fair and honest as it relates to social, cultural analysis of what's going on. Lastly, and thank you again for taking the time to interview and thank you and your colleagues for your work and please give our best to them and like to ask, what, what are you, what are you all working on next? Are you, you know, expanding your work here in decolonizing economics? Are you, what's your sort of next focus in project?
- [65:28]
A
Oh, good question. So, so we're all working on different things. Yeah. And I think we're. Yeah, it's. Yeah. Going in different directions, taking decolonization as a starting point, but you know, because we have our own research agendas on different topics. Like I work on finance mining and my colleagues have different research agendas as well. But actually just had a meeting this morning with one of my co authors, Serbi Kesar, and we're working on a project which is on actually international non governmental organizations, INGOs, and how they're dealing with the decolonization because apparently they're also decolonizing. Now everyone's decolonizing and we're analyzing what potential is there for that to be something progressive, to be something radical? Or are they just kind of reproducing Eurocentric type of development but using decolonization language because they're trying to legitimize what they're doing. So that's something that hopefully will. Will come out. Well, I don't want to put a timeline on it, but that's something that we're working on. Yeah.
- [66:41]
B
Right. Well, thank you so much and best of luck. Best wishes to you and your colleagues and thank you for joining us today and for your work. Hope it continues to get wide exposure and conversation. And as you all are working on your other works, we hopefully look forward to maybe getting in touch with you again to speak with you about what comes next. And again, thank you so much. We have enjoyed being able to have a conversation with you about a very vital and valuable subject and topic and conversation that sort of, you know, stretches and reaches everywhere to people everywhere. And so thank you all for making that very valuable contribution. And again, we wish you all the best.
- [67:24]
A
Thank you so much for having me and for the opportunity to talk about the book.
- [67:29]
B
Thank you so very much. Take care.
- [67:30]
A
Take care.