Summer Academy for Pluralist Economics 2019: Economics in Transformation

The financial crisis of 2008 is an iconic symbol of our current economic system’s limits. It also reveals a deep crisis of economic thinking. All over the world, students who want to deal with these challenges have to realise that their studies do not provide sufficient answers. Instead, they are presented with an abstract model world in which the forces of supply and demand generate equilibria in markets with mechanical regularity, and crises only appear as external shocks, i.e. temporary deviations from the perfect normal state.

The current political and social challenges demand answers from economics. But instead of developing clever concepts and new ideas, economists are busy looking at the intellectual issues of the past decades: growth and productivity, efficiency and rationality, equilibria and exogenous shocks. The pressing questions of our time remain unanswered: finite resources, climate change, social justice, global power structures, models of a good life.

We want to change this. And that is why we organise the Summer Academy. We want to think outside the box and broaden our view for new and different perspectives on economics. We want to bring people from different backgrounds, disciplines and perspectives into dialogue with each other and develop a more detailed understanding of the foundations and limitations of economics. Because the world is more diverse than one theory alone can grasp.

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