Category: Blog

Earlier this month, I published a letter in the Financial Times with Carolina Alves, Besiana Balla and Devika Dutt (July 17th, 2018). The letter was a reaction the lack of diversity in Martin Wolf’s summer reading list in the FT. His reading list consisted of only authors based in either the UK or the US, 12 out of 13 of the authors were men, and most of them were writing within the so-called mainstream of the profession. We were therefore compelled to put together our own list in order to show that heterodox, female and/or non-Western scholars also do publish high quality work – although it tends to go unnoticed due to the biases in our field. So, we put together this Alternative Economics Summer Reading List (published on Developing Economics).

It was Martin’s response (see here for the full exchange) to my comment under his list that finally inspired us to write a letter to the FT. In our letter, we urge Martin to be explicit about his biases when publishing such reading lists, as many FT readers might be misled into thinking that his lists represent the breadth of the field.

The letter went on to become the most read FT Letter of the week.