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Introduction

While there have been repeated calls to decolonize the social sciences over the past half century, remarkably decolonization has only recently made its way onto the agendas of many economics associations and university committees in institutions of the capitalist center.1 In stark contrast to the anti-colonial calls for change that originally spurred the decolonization agenda, the approach of the top echelon of the discipline has been severely limited.

By "top" we mean the institutions - departments and journals - that lead in mainstream rankings, which are ultimately defined by power hierarchies, not by any broader measures of quality or relevance (Amsler and Bolsmann, 2012; Shahjahan et al., 2017; Heckman and Moktan, 2020; Zacchia, 2021). What gets accepted as legitimate and mainstream knowledge in economics is largely decided in the top echelons of the discipline, given the power, funding, and prestige that they possess. Unsurprisingly, the way this hierarchy is produced is one of the major barriers to the decolonization of economics.

A recent intervention by the economist Dani Rodrik exemplifies well how the problem is perceived at the top of the discipline. In 2021, Rodrik wrote a short article in Project Syndicate reflecting on the lack of diversity within the ranks of economists, elaborated further in a research article in 2024 (Aigner et al., 2024). His concern is that power within economics is based overwhelmingly in a few departments in North America and Western Europe. He cites studies that show nearly 90 percent of authors in the top 8 economics journals are based in the United States and Western Europe (Fontana et al., 2019), while the editorial boards of the 50 highest-ranked journals are dominated by researchers based in just a few universities in the United States (Angus et al., 2021). This, Rodrik writes, demonstrates a worrying lack of representation of views of scholars based in periphery countries. In particular, he argues that insights from regions outside the United States and Western Europe are extremely important and have historically been crucial for the development of Nobel Prize-winning ideas in economics.2

Rodrik explains how observing sharecropping relationships in Kenya was pivotal for the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in developing his influential theory on asymmetric information (Stiglitz, 2001). Similarly, Albert Hirschman's time in Nigeria studying rail companies helped him develop the ideas presented in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). Rodrik emphasizes that when conventional wisdom in economics is confronted by "anomalous" behavior in "unfamiliar" contexts, economic theory is greatly enriched. While Rodrik's (2021) categorization of much of the world outside of the United States and Western Europe as "anomalous" and "unfamiliar" is not meant with malintent, it reveals that the conventional wisdom in economics is founded primarily on how economies of the capitalist center are thought to function - though they encompass only the minority of the world's population. What counts as the dominant thinking and scholarship in economics today developed on the canvas of the capitalist center's economies, as if they were the global norm. Further, the canvas seems to have been painted in isolation, to which the history of global capitalism, colonialism, or the Transatlantic Slave Trade was just an additional, primitive, or incidental backdrop.

Rodrik's observations are welcome, but they are symptomatic of the limits of mainstream economics. Specifically, economics has been and continues to be fundamentally challenged from many angles and corners of the world. Scholarship centered on the periphery presents crucial alternatives to the dominant economics paradigm, but it tends to be ignored and even suppressed. The dominant economics framework only considers how economies in the periphery are aberrant vis-à-vis the center; and alternate theorizations from the vantage point of the periphery are summarily discarded. This reflects a deep-seated ideological bias against, and systematic exclusion of, alternative ways of making sense of the world. Rodrik's observations are also symptomatic of self-reflection within the field, which only focuses on certain unequal outcomes instead of digging deeper into structural processes of exclusion, of which the lack of diversity is merely a symptom.

The power and powerlessness of economics

Two distinct definitions can be employed to describe economics. One is a broad definition, referring to research on how economic processes are structured, how they interact with various social and natural processes, and what they reveal about our social systems (e.g., H.-J. Chang, 2014). This understanding includes research from across the globe and from all theoretical traditions that deal with questions related to the economy. The other is a narrower definition, characterizing economics as primarily concerned with allocation of resources for the most efficient production in the face of scarce resources and the need to optimize human behavior to achieve efficient outcomes - or, as Robbins (1932, p. 15) puts it, economics is "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." Typically, this second definition is consistent with the theories and practices that guide dominant research and teaching. Even when non-economic dimensions, such as social identity or natural interactions, are explored within the economics discipline, they are only explored within this framing. When we refer to today's mainstream or dominant economics, we are referring to approaches consistent with this definition.

This dominant school of thought is called "neoclassical economics" and its more contemporary variation is "late neoclassical economics" (Madra, 2017).3 This framework has been the most powerful in shaping how economists, as well as people, generally think about the world. Its dominance reflects how the economics discipline has changed over time from being more consistent with the broader definition to a more exclusive focus on this narrow definition. This development involved writing off all ways of approaching economic questions that are inconsistent with late neoclassical economics. The narrowing has obscured contestations surrounding economic thinking and concealed competing theoretical frameworks that often provide different answers to economic questions, such as Marxist or Keynesian theories. Furthermore, the rise to dominance of (late) neoclassical economics is related to ideological and political developments (Resnick and Wolff, 2006). Late neoclassical economics imposes constraints on what economic analysis can ask and achieve, relegating debates about a society's values, goals, and aspirations to a realm beyond economic theory.

The power of economic thinking in shaping conventional wisdom and policymaking

It is presented as natural and intuitive in mainstream economics that competing ends and scarce means guide our lives and economies. The idea is that there are constraints on human behavior when, through a constrained optimization approach, we make choices by weighing their costs and benefits. Businesses and governments are also seen to operate in this way. In her recent book, Elizabeth Popp Berman highlights how the "economic way of reasoning" pervaded economic policymaking in the United States between 1965 and 1985 (Berman, 2022, p. 3). She argues that this style of policymaking is centered around two main features: a deep attachment to markets as efficient allocators of resources and an emphasis on efficiency as the measure of a good policy. And why shouldn't it be? Isn't achieving a particular policy goal in the most cost-effective manner an unequivocal good? It is likely that most people would agree with this sentiment, reflecting the power of economics. It shows that economic thinking does not only impact how economists themselves think but has also come to pervade what is considered conventional wisdom (Galbraith, 1998).

Although economic ways of thinking have been fundamentally normalized, they are not natural, obvious, or politically neutral (Berman, 2022). The value of efficiency is a political notion that displaces other values, such as equity (Knafo et al., 2019). In economics, efficiency in the context of production means producing the most profitable goods or services at the minimum possible cost. In general, an efficient allocation of resources across competing ends or competing interest is one that cannot be changed without making someone worse off. The value of efficiency in economic thinking obfuscates the political nature of the process behind identifying what the goals of an economic policy should be and the parameters on which efficiency is measured. This way of thinking has been institutionalized in governments and international policy organizations (Charusheela, 2005; Fourcade, 2009).

For example, policymakers shifted from thinking of pollution as a menace to the natural environment to considering it an externality that is simply not properly priced by the market (Isıkara, 2023), or from thinking of healthcare as a universal right to concentrating on its most efficient and cost-effective delivery, which meant the introduction of means-testing and cost-sharing (Berman, 2022). This economic reasoning not only valorizes efficiency, but also delegitimizes competing ways of...