Category: Covid-19

I wrote an article on how COVID-19 exposes weaknesses in the dominant Economics narrative, and how heterodox economics offer important alternatives, with Carolina Alves for the Review of Agrarian Studies. Here’s the abstract:

In this ar­ti­cle, we argue that so­ci­eties’ un­pre­pared­ness and in­ad­e­quate re­sponses to the Covid-19 pan­demic ex­pose weak­nesses in the foun­da­tions of the dom­i­nant eco­nomic par­a­digm. We doc­u­ment how eco­nom­ics came to dis­em­bed it­self from broader so­ci­etal analy­sis and how this has in­flu­enced pub­lic pol­icy in prob­lem­atic ways, lead­ing to priv­i­leg­ing of ef­fi­ciency over re­silience. We then go a step fur­ther to con­sider the role of eco­nomic ev­i­dence in pub­lic pol­icy more gen­er­ally. Fur­ther­more, we demon­strate how het­ero­dox eco­nom­ics can en­rich our un­der­stand­ings of our economies’ weak­nesses and of how to build a more re­silient and just econ­omy. We con­clude that we need an ex­pla­na­tion of the cri­sis that is ca­pa­ble of see­ing the econ­omy as more than just mar­kets and as em­bed­ded in so­ci­ety; one that is ca­pa­ble of link­ing the causes and con­se­quences of the pan­demic to our sys­tems of pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Read the full paper.