Breaking the mould

A global push to rethink economics

- By Matthew Taylor

As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class, complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”.

A few weeks later, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society”.

These small acts of discontent found echoes in campuses around the world, as normally staid economics students demanded a broader and more questioning syllabus that more accurately reflected and challenged the world as it was.

These strands came together in early 2013 at the London School of Economics with the inaugural meeting of Rethinking Economics - a student-led organisation that has gone on to challenge the way economics is taught at universities around the world.

“That first meeting was a bit chaotic,” said Yuan Yang, one of the group’s founders and a Labour MP since 2024. “It was just after our final exams and it was a bit intense. But I was surprised with how many students turned up not just from the LSE but from other universities as well.”

“It was very volunteer-led,” Yang said. “My dad, bless him, helped out by doing some filming ... and we had some of the leading professors helping out. [The South Korean economist and academic] Ha-Joon Chang arrived early and helped us make name tags.”

Chang, now a leading author and professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, said the launch came after decades when the neoclassical school of economics dominated universities, “like Catholic theology in medieval Europe ... a doctrine that fundamentally defines the way humanity sees the world”.