The idea and the motion to rethink economics was conceptualised four decades ago and has intensified since. Efforts to remodel a rigid and impractical discipline led to concrete impacts and ripples in France, Cambridge, Harvard and the American Economic Review academic journal in the 1990s and 2000s. After the 2007-08 global financial crisis, this movement garnered momentum and strength as economics graduate students worldwide were left to understand reality using only calculus questions and multiple assignments and theoretical foundations that were disconnected with the inequitable reality of society.

 

It was from this urgent call to and for action that the Rethinking Economics movement emerged. Having held its first organisers’ meet in the UK in 2013, the community has now spread to 15+ countries with more than 40 universities around the world have established local chapters.

 

A need to organise around this clarion call and a deep-seated passion to re-evaluate age-old economic principles and theories united students from Indian universities. Unable to decipher deplorable and unequal societal realities utilising neoliberal approaches to economics, students from around the country joined forces to seek to revise existing economics curricula, spread knowledge about alternative methods of thinking about the economy, and initiate systemic change towards a more inclusive and open economy and economics education.

 

Now spread and existing beyond the rigid disciplinary boundaries of economics, the Rethinking Economics India Network comprises of development practitioners, social science researchers, and non-economics students as well as core economics scholars. We all are united by and towards a common cause of seeking to remodel and reframe economics in an inclusive, alternative way.