I recently wrote a review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology for Nature. Read the full review.
Author: Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven
Lecturer in International Development.
The Syllabus Cyberflâneur: Health Inequities, Financialization and Imperialism
With debate raging around the implications of COVID-19 for the “developing world”, Ingrid Kvangraven’s turn to guest curate the Cyberflâneur has come at the right time.[…] Ingrid has “chosen a selection of articles that can help us better understand how COVID-19 will impact developing countries and the underlying structures that lead to inequitable and underfunded health systems, with a focus on financialization and imperialism.” You’ll find some real gems, including on the “coloniality in knowledge production about public health”, why blended finance might not be as good as it sounds or how the IMF and World Bank have fed an audit culture “serving to obscure the destructive effects of NGO proliferation on public health systems”.
See the selection of articles with my comments here.
Samir Amin: A Pioneering Marxist and Third World Activist (new blog post)
I recently had the pleasure of contributing a blog post to the excellent blog Progress in Political Economy (PPE), which is based at the University of Sydney’s Political Economy department. I wrote about Samir Amin’s legacy, based on my recent Legacy piece in Development and Change. Check it out here.
Diversify and decolonise your holiday reading list (openDemocracy)
Along with Devika Dutt and Surbhi Kesar, I put together an alternative winter reading list on behalf of D-Econ. It was published in openDemocracy’s ‘Decolonising the economy’ series. Check it out.
Impoverished Economics? A Critical Assessment of the New Gold Standard (new essay)
I wrote an essay for the World Development Symposium on Development and Poverty Alleviation. Here is the abstract:
This article situates the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in the history of thought on development, tracing how the focus, theory and methods have shifted in the field. The article evaluates theoretical and methodological critiques of the way randomized control trials (RCTs) are employed by the laureates, as well as attempts to overcome these challenges. In terms of theory, the article demonstrates what gets lost when experiments are guided by methodological individualism and assumptions of individual utility-maximizing behavior. In terms of methodology, the article unpacks the limits of RCTs related to their causal model, and their lack of attention to human agency and wider socio-economic context. Finally, the article discusses the experimental approach’s relevance for research and policy-making and cautions against any approach becoming a “gold standard,” due to the importance of pluralism for maintaining an open debate about development.
Read the full article here and do check out the other essays as well.
Samir Amin: A Pioneering Marxist and Third World Activist (new article)
I had the honor of writing a legacy piece on Samir Amin for Development and Change this year. It will be a part of the 2020 Forum issue, but is already available for download.
Interview with A Correction (Podcast)
I speak with Lev Moscow about the Nobel Prize in Economics (and what it says about the state of the economics profession). A Correction is a podcast that is directed towards high school teachers and students, based in New York City. Listen to the podcast here.
