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.
Category: Op-ed

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).
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.
Following my book review of Anwar Shaikh’s Capitalism – Competition, Conflict, Crises, I ended up in a debate with a Norwegian philosopher (and Marxist) about Shaikh’s labor theory of value. The debate took place in the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen.
Here is the exchange:
Anwar Shaikh versus seriøs teori (Jørgen Sandemose, May 30th 2016)
Seriøs teori (Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, June 1st 2016)
Om en uholdbar «verditeori» (Jørgen Sandemose, June 8th, 2016)
På tide å lese boka? (Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, June 14th 2016)
Den siste replikken (Jørgen Sandemose, June 15th, 2016)
In English:
Can development goals help development finance? If so, how? (Righting Finance, October 20th, 2015)
In Norwegian:
Globale mål: Hvorfor, hvordan og for hvem? (Ny Tid, November 12th 2015)
FNs bærekraftsmål: Manglende kobling mellom mål og middel (Gjeldsbrevet, December 15th 2015)
In addition, there’s the FT article from this summer that I wrote with Sanjay Reddy on the same topic: Does the world really need development goals?
On August 28th 2015, Professor Sanjay Reddy and I published an op-ed on the Financial Times blog, BeyondBrics. In the op-ed we discuss the purpose of global development goals, as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are about to be adopted. Read a slightly extended version on Sanjay Reddy’s blog.