\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>s the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a \u201cspecific and limited view\u201d that perpetuated \u201ca problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality\u201d.<\/p>\n A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a \u201cpost-crash economics society\u201d.<\/p>\n These small acts of discontent found echoes in campuses around the world in the months that followed, as normally staid economics students demanded a broader and more questioning syllabus that more accurately reflected and challenged the world as it was.<\/p>\n <\/span>A Lehman Brothers trader at the New York stock exchange in September 2008. <\/span> Photograph: David Karp\/AP<\/p>\n These disparate strands came together in early 2013 at the London School of Economics with the inaugural meeting of Rethinking Economics \u2013 a student-led organisation that has gone on to challenge the way economics is taught at universities around the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThat first meeting was a bit chaotic,\u201d recalls Yuan Yang, one of the group\u2019s founders and a Labour MP since 2024. \u201cIt was just after our final exams and it was all a bit intense. But I was really surprised with how many students turned up not just from the LSE but from other universities as well.\u201d<\/p>\n Yang, who was studying a masters in economics at the time, said the first meeting was held on a \u201cbit of shoestring\u201d, dependent on volunteers and \u201csome real acts of kindness\u201d from family and friends as well as some of the LSE\u2019s leading academics.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very volunteer led,\u201d she said. \u201cMy dad, bless him, helped out by doing some filming \u2026 and we had some of the leading professors helping out. [The South Korean economist and academic] Ha-Joon Chang arrived early and helped us make name tags.\u201d<\/p>\n Chang, now a leading author and professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, said the launch came after decades when the neo-classical school of economics had come to dominate universities \u201clike Catholic theology in medieval Europe \u2026 a doctrine that fundamentally defines the way humanity sees the world\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018Rethinking Economics has exposed the staggering deficiency in the way economists are educated\u2019, says economist Ha-Joon Chang.<\/span> Photograph: PR image<\/p>\n \u201cBy demanding that economics education should be more pluralist, more ethically conscientious, more historically aware, and more oriented towards the real world, Rethinking Economics has exposed the staggering deficiency in the way economists are educated and induced some significant, albeit woefully insufficient changes in economics teaching around the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Rethinking Economics has blossomed since the first meeting and now has thousands of members, including several eminent economists, across more than 40 countries.<\/p>\n According to its communications lead, Sara Mahdi, its aim is to make economics education \u201cplural, critical, decolonised and historically grounded\u201d rather than \u201cdominated by a single framework presented as \u2018neutral\u2019 or \u2018objective\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are building an international movement of young people who are organising, educating and agitating for an economics that takes account of the real world we see around us,\u201d she said. \u201cOne that portrays the economy as embedded in ecology, power, institutions, history and inequality, and treats competing economic theories and methods as legitimate, not marginal to a sort of classical, almost mathematical view, which has been dominant in many institutions for decades.\u201d<\/p>\n Mahdi, a degrowth, economics and anthropology graduate from University College London and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says the group has secured tangible changes in the way economics is taught \u2013 from full programme redesigns to the introduction of new core modules \u2013 at scores of institutions.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018We are building an international movement of young people who are organising, educating and agitating for an economics that takes account of the real world we see around us,\u2019 says Sara Mahdi.<\/span> Photograph: PR image<\/p>\n \u201cSince 2019 alone the movement has supported and recorded more than 80 campaign wins in universities across 35 countries, including 23 major curriculum reforms, impacting tens of thousands of students,\u201d she said. \u201cThese are the kinds of reforms that don\u2019t just add \u2018one optional lecture\u2019, they reshape what students learn as mainstream economics.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the changes highlighted are the launch of a politics, philosophy and economics course at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014, an interdisciplinary programme at the University of Lille in France in 2020, and an economics and society undergraduate programme and public sector economics masters programme at Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2023.<\/p>\n One of Rethinking Economics\u2019s most active groups is based in South Africa, where the campaign grew out of a wider student protest movement calling for greater access to higher education for poorer communities.<\/p>\n The junior programme officer at Rethinking Economics for Africa, Amaarah Garda, said what started as a protest about fees had become a broader critique of the academic system and its colonial outlook.<\/p>\n <\/span>Student organisers for the seventh Rethinking Economics for Africa (Refa) festival in Johannesburg in 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Courtesy of Refa<\/p>\n Initially, universities refused to change mainstream economics teaching, so the campaign changed tack.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have had to carve out our own progressive courses and events at these universities,\u201d Garda said. \u201cSo it is not that everyone who does economics is exposed to a more progressive vision, but those courses are now available.\u201d<\/p>\n The movement was growing, she said, as students sought answers to the issues confronting them in the news and their day-to-day lives, from how war economies work to what is being discussed at UN climate talks.<\/p>\n <\/span>A Rethinking Economics gathering in Zambia.<\/span> Photograph: PR Image<\/p>\n \u201cIn South Africa, and perhaps globally, we can see that our students are finding these ideas not just interesting but more and more urgent given the multiple crisis that we are facing,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are approaching us to explain topics because they can see how critical they are to society and they cannot get that information through their usual courses.\u201d<\/p>\n Many academics have welcomed the space the campaign has opened up.<\/p>\n Clara Mattei, a professor of economics at the University of Tulsa in the US and president of the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation (Free), said her group was collaborating with students from Rethinking Economics to \u201cimprove economic education and make it a useful tool for expanding economic agency among the general public\u201d.<\/p>\n She said the current economic system was \u201cshowing its most violent face \u2026 with rampant militarism and unprecedented, obscene levels of inequality with four people owning more wealth than four billion people\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Clara Mattei, a professor of economics at the University of Tulsa in the US, said her group was collaborating with students from Rethinking Economics to improve economic education.<\/span> Photograph: PR IMAGE<\/p>\n \u201cIt is urgent that the economics discipline learn to understand these issues as systemic features of our capitalist economy rather than as the result of market imperfections or crony capitalism,\u201d she said, adding that students such as those involved in Rethinking Economics were \u201cpushing toward more courageous frameworks within the economic tradition \u2026 to prioritise the logic of need over the logic of profit\u201d.<\/p>\n Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US, said Rethinking Economics was forcing established economists to ask the basic questions that many had been trained to overlook.<\/p>\n She said there were still power structures within institutions, thinktanks and journals that wanted to maintain a narrower, restricted view of economics, but that the campaign was making headway.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a battle, but what I really appreciate about this group is that they go about things in a thoughtful way, they are willing to hear people from the other side.\u201d<\/p>\n She said she had spoken to Rethinking Economics groups around the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThey bring in all kinds of people, not just economists and students but activists and others together, and they look at the same questions in such different ways \u2026 I have actually learned a lot from them \u2026 It has made me realise that economics is too important to be left to economists.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a \u201cspecific and limited view\u201d that perpetuated \u201ca problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality\u201d. A few weeks later, on the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44286,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[3215,844,5731,9268,23020,3305],"class_list":{"0":"post-44285","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-changing","9":"tag-economics","10":"tag-movement","11":"tag-rethinking","12":"tag-subject","13":"tag-taught"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}