Heterodox Economics

“In the last decade and a half we have been challenged by a global financial crash, a pandemic and an environmental crisis with grave implications for all our futures. Economics should be helping to provide insights and solutions – and individual economists are doing so. But there is a sense – not least among young people studying the subject – that economics as a discipline has lost its way. Conventional economics often seems complacent and inward looking, with too much focus on what is technically intriguing and too little on what urgently needs fixing.

While this may be true of much mainstream economics, heterodox voices have been raised in the past – and may well provide insights for the future. This event will survey ideas of figures from Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx, to Joan Robinson and John Maynard Keynes, to Amatya Sen and Thomas Piketty. It will argue that the heterodox tradition does provide essential tools for meeting these challenges.”