Invisible Handcuffs: Unchaining Economics

Shloka Murarka is an economics Masters student, former activist with Rethinking Economics and now board member of the new UK Association for Quality Economics, AQE, an initiative she helped to launch this year — and the focus of this episode.

Keynes is quoted as having said that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

Well, if that’s true, then the youth protesting around the world are ultimately protesting the ideas put in place by those “practical men” (and let’s face it, they are still mostly men),...

In our first season we explored the various problems with the discipline of economics and how they relate to our crises.
In season two we’re starting to dive into the various ways — given all its flaws and given mounting frustration with the status quo — economics seems to resist reform.
One of the ways is in the institution of education, the university, itself.
That's the topic of discussion with our guest in this episode, Jennie C Stephens, Professor of Climate Justice at the University of Maynooth in Ireland and author of the acclaimed open source book Climate Justice and...

Our guests this episode, which kicks of Season 2, are Stefan Pühringer and Theresa Hager of the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria.

We recorded this conversation at the end of the summer 2026 and are releasing it a few weeks later, during a week in which many European universities are opening their doors for a new wave of students.

Which makes it an apt episode to start with because, it is all about the influence of economics education on our mindsets, on our imaginations, and how this in turn feeds through into what we as a society believe is...

In what way might economists’ flawed understanding of progress be driving the many risks we face today?

This episode's guest is Luke Kemp, Research Affiliate at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Existential Risk and author of the best-selling, critically acclaimed book Goliath’s Curse, The History and Future of Societal Collapse.

Luke actually trained and worked as a climate economist.

Indeed he was drawn to researching civilisational collapse when he saw that climate economic models were tending to look only at average trajectories and not so-called tail risks — these are the worst case outcomes which may have a...