Ingrid's website
I recently wrote a Letter in the Financial Times (snippet above) on the limits to Daron Acemoglu’s argument about liberalism, technology and the working class. You can read the full Letter here and Acemoglu’s original piece here.
I also recently wrote a related (but longer) op-ed on the mainstream understanding of technological development in the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen. Read it here.
I wrote an essay for the INET blog on the problems with how colonialism & imperialism in understood in the Economics discipline (exemplified by Nievas and Piketty’s recent paper). Have a read and see what you think.
This new article in World Development interrogates how Eurocentrism is reflected in the Economics discipline’s approach to mining as well as in global mining policy. It then puts forward an alternative, South-centered understanding of mining, which is explored through a historical view of the Obuasi mine, which has been mined by AngloGold Ashanti in Ghana since 1897. The article is part of a special issue I’m co-editing on Decolonising Economic Development with Surbhi Kesar.
In response to the announcement of the Economics Nobel being awarded to Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (commonly referred to as “AJR”), I wrote a commentary for Economic and Political weekly with my co-authors Surbhi Kesar and Devika Dutt.
Here is the link to the piece and you can download the PDF for free here.
You can also read the piece in French, Persian and Portuguese.
I recently published a new open access article – The Hierarchies of Global Finance: An Anti-Disciplinary Research Agenda – with my friend and collaborator Maria Dyveke Styve, in Review of Political Economy.
Here is the abstract:
This article critically assesses the economics discipline’s capacity to capture the structural features and political economy implications of contemporary financial processes in the global South, with a particular focus on South Africa. Delving into the complexities of financial processes in South Africa, the article proposes an alternative, anti-disciplinary framework for understanding drivers and impacts of financial processes. We show how such an approach cannot simply be about adding social or political perspectives to mainstream economics, but rather about interrogating how we think about economic systems themselves, drawing on a variety of theoretical and disciplinary insights. This is about taking an open and holistic approach that centers history, power, structures, and social relations. With an issue such as finance, critical political economy approaches from a variety of disciplines allow us to see that finance cannot be separated from the wider economy or from the social relations it forms part of today and historically. This becomes particularly clear when considering how racial, gender and class relations both impact and are impacted by financial processes in South Africa. We conclude with recommendations for studies of changing financial processes globally and in the global South.
I was recently on a plenary sponsored by the Development Studies Association (DSA) in Manchester with Kamna Patel, Sara Stevano and Indrajit Roy, where we were each asked to answer the above question. Along with the organizers, Pritish Behuria and Tom Goodfellow, we have now published the plenary discussion on the DSA blog:
Along with Erik Reinert, I’ve published A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development. In contrast to mainstream approaches to economics, this Guide addresses the complex reality of economic development as an inherently uneven process, exploring the ways of theorizing and empirically exploring the mechanisms with which the unevenness manifests itself. It covers a wide array of issues influencing wealth and poverty, technological innovation, ecology and sustainability, financialization, population, gender, and geography, considering the dynamics of cumulative causations created by the interplay between these factors.
I have a new paper out with Surbhi Kesar in the New School Department of Economics’ Working Paper series: Standing in the Way of Rigor? Economics’ Meeting with the Decolonizing Agenda.
The abstract:
This paper critically engages with various aspects of the decolonization movement in economics and its implications for the discipline. We operationalize the insights from this engagement using a survey of 498 economists that explores how faculty across different kinds of departments, disciplines, geographies, and identities perceive the problems of economics teaching, how they think economics pedagogy should be reformed, if at all, and how they relate to decolonial critiques of economics pedagogy. Based on the survey findings, we conclude that the mainstream of the field’s emphasis on technical training and rigor, within a narrow theoretical and methodological framework, likely stands in the way of the very possibility for decolonizing economics, given its strong contrast to key ideas associated with the decolonization agenda, such as positionality, centering power relations, exposing underlying politics of defining theoretical categories, and unpacking the politics of knowledge production. Nonetheless, the survey responses clearly chart out the challenges that the field faces in terms of decolonizing pedagogy, which is a first step towards debate and change.
I wrote a blog post for Developing Economics with Carolina Alves and Daniela Gabor on some of the revisionist takes on the consequences of the Washington Consensus. Check it out.
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