This week I had the pleasure of appearing on Doug Henwood’s political economy radio show, the LBO news. He picked my brain about the recent developments in the field of development economics and the work of Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer, in particular. This is a one-hour episode, with René Rojas being interviewed by the political demonstrations in Chile in the first half, and me being interviewed in the second half. You can download the podcast here or listen to it by pressing the play button below.
Author: Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven
Lecturer in International Development.
Impoverished economics? Unpacking the economics Nobel Prize (openDemocracy)
I recently wrote this opinion piece for openDemocracy on the work of this year’s winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The so-called Nobel went to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, for promoting an experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
The piece was also re-published by the URPE blog, The Mint, the Kashmir Times, Momentum Institut (in German), and Disparada (in Portuguese), and was covered by several newspapers, including by the Argentinian business newspaper La Nacion (Con el Nobel a los “randomistas”,la grieta llegó al ámbito académico) and the French daily newspaper Libération (L’extinction expérimentale et aléatoire du paupérisme).
Hardcore Peripheries (article in The Mint)
In this article in The Mint, I explore the relevance of dependency theory/ies today, along with Farwa Sial and Carolina Alves. We also identify some common critiques of dependency theory and argue that these are rooted in misunderstandings about the theories.
New Working Paper: Heterodox Economics as a Positive Project: Revisiting the Debate
I have a new working paper with Carolina Alves in the ESRC GPID Research Network Working Paper series.
Read a short blog post about the project or a long one.
Download the working paper here.
Keynote on the political economy of the SDGs, Rio de Janeiro (video)
I was invited by the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) to give a keynote on the political economy of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at their annual conference, which was organized in collaboration with the IAP Science for Poverty Eradication Committee. You can view the keynote presentation in the video above. Here is my presentation and here is a news article on the event (in Portuguese).
New blog post: Why so Hostile? Busting Myths about Heterodox Economics
Carolina Alves and I unpack misunderstandings about Heterodox Economics in our recent blog post on Developing Economics:
By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven and Carolina Alves
“Economics is unique among the social sciences in having a single monolithic mainstream, which is either unaware of or actively hostile to alternative approaches.” (John King 2013: 17)
What does heterodox economics mean? Is the label helpful or harmful? Being outside of the mainstream of the Economics discipline, the way we position ourselves may be particularly important. For this reason, many around us shun the use of the term “heterodox” and advise against using it. However, we believe the reluctance to use the term stems in part from misunderstandings of (and sometimes disagreement over) what the term means and perhaps disagreements over strategies for how to change the discipline.
In other words, this is an important debate about both identification and strategy. In this blog, we wish to raise the issue in heterodox and mainstream circles, by busting a few common myths about Heterodox Economics – mostly stemming from the orthodoxy. This is a small part of a larger project on defining heterodox economics.
Read more here.
The post has also been re-published by Union for Radical Political Economics and the Monthly Review. It has also been translated to Spanish (see here).
Diversity and Excellence: Not A Zero Sum Game
I recently published the post Diversity and Excellence: Not A Zero Sum Game along with colleagues for the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s (INET) blog series “Diversity and Pluralism in Economics: Problems and Solutions”.
