This August, the Rethinking Economics “International Summer Gathering” brought over 70 students and academics together at La Bergerie de Villarceaux, a retreat centre and organic farm owned by the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation, in order to overcome neo-liberal economic thinking in society and in the academic curriculum.

Funders and partners were invited to an “open day” on 16 August, and EDGE Funders Alliance met with representatives of KR Foundation, Mava Foundation, Partners for a New Economy, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, European Cultural Foundation, Bewegungsstiftung, Open Society Initiative for Europe, and the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation to exchange on the role of philanthropy in overcoming economic orthodoxy. Based on the shared conviction that the current extractivist economic system needs to be replaced by a “transformative economy”, the foundations committed to continue collaboration and supporting actors engaged in building economic alternatives.

Stay tuned for more information on how EDGE will organise around this increasingly relevant issue of economic paradigm shift. The crisis never stopped!

Maeve Cohen, ReThinking Economics Director, shares her thoughts on the Summer Gathering in this guest blog.

“This week marks 10 years since the collapse of the world’s fourth largest investment bank. This event, and the Global Financial Crisis it was a manifestation of, shook the discipline of economics to its core. It forced practitioners to re-examine theories and assumptions they had been so sure of just a few months earlier. It also shone a spotlight on just how big an influence economic decisions have on the lives of ordinary people.

The combination; an inability to predict or explain what had happened, mixed with the massive impact the event was having on the lives of ordinary people, inspired a whole new generation of young people to study economics. In the following years, young, hopeful students entered economic lecture theatres in their thousands to try and get some insight into what had happened, why it had been allowed to happen, and how economic insights could help us to mitigate the damage and build a brighter future. These young hopefuls were bitterly disappointed.

Economics undergraduate courses were not reflecting the intriguing and mercurial world these people could see around them. The lectures students were receiving were lifted straight out of 1950s textbooks, describing and analysing a world that very few of them recognised as their own. This was a world in which individual agents, compete in markets to maximise narrowly defined ‘economic utility’ if they’re people, or profit if they’re firms. It was being taught as a science, devoid of value judgements and simply THE way that society behaves.

The system is failing 

Students across the world were incensed. Clearly their lessons were deeply value-laden, they valued efficiency and growth, individuals over collectives and markets over other forms of organisation. They did very little to explain or understand the things that go on outside of this sphere such as domestic labour that is not traded on a market, or cultural and familial institutions that do not act to maximise profit or pleasure. They also failed to adequately address issues that many would-be-economists view as extremely important such as climate change and wealth and income inequality. To many, it was no wonder that our global economic system was failing such large sections of society when this was the way we were training future economists. They started to organise.

From 2012 student groups campaigning for curriculum reform at their universities began to spring up across the globe. Six years later 51 student campaigning groups in 24 countries make up the network Rethinking Economics. We campaign for a more pluralist, critical and real-world economics. We demand that students are exposed to various different schools of economic thought such as ecological economics, which sees the economic system as part of the larger ecological system and considers the environmental consequences of economic action from the start, or feminist economics which sees gender relations and the work that women do as integral to the functioning of the economy. We demand that students are given at least a basic understanding of the history of their discipline and the politics and philosophy that have contributed to it. Most importantly, we demand that students are taught to critically engage with anything they are learning so that they can develop the skills they will need as future economists to understand and overcome the challenges society faces in the 21st century.

This is an almighty task, universities face many barriers that prevent them from creating the necessary change. We know that our only hope of success is working together, sharing our knowledge and resources, and working collaboratively. Last month saw our first International Summer Gathering in the glorious French countryside. More than 70 students, representing 35 groups from over 20 countries came together for a week to engage in peer-to-peer training, develop strategy and build relationships with their fellow campaigners from all over the world.

Economists of the future

Over the course of the week students were able to draw comfort and motivation from the fact that their counterparts in countries as different as Denmark and South Africa were experiencing the same frustrations with their education. We designed and fostered a culture of respect and understanding in which people were listened to and supported. We were able to learn from each other and share knowledge and experiences. We made and strengthen friendships, developed international and regional strategies and devised combined projects to ensure our work has the largest possible impact.

The students came away from this event with a more concrete understanding of the challenges that lay ahead and a renewed energy and understanding of how to overcome them. We began to practice the culture of compassion, understanding and listening that we want to see at the heart of our economic system. We are not naive, we know that there is a long way to go before the teaching and practice of economics gets to the point that it needs to reach, but we also know we are an essential part of that puzzle. We are the economists of the future and in that week, in a picturesque chateau just outside Paris, we got a beautiful glimpse of what the future could be.”