Open-Mindedness, Tolerance, and Public Engagement. These three terms signify a disassembling of dogma, restrictions, silos, and separateness. When information and contemplation can flow more freely between disciplines, people, and understandings – it can only have the effect of enriching them so that they can achieve more.

The study and practice of economics as a discipline in many circles of influence has long been limited to a monolithic series of principles, assumptions, and frames of reference which could benefit from the sentiments these terms inspire.

Open-Mindedness: to change, to seeing things anew

Tolerance: of pluralism

Public Engagement:with the problem and solutions

The economic behavior of people, enterprises, states, and markets is seldom explained by an element distilled into a university textbook. Economic reality is determined by a plurality of factors, not mutually exclusive. The fact that the Economy, a construct of humans, exists within the material, dynamic system of Earth means that the latter cannot be squeezed into the former or reduced to a mere exogenous input and treated as a given. Conventional theory with problematic blind spots is still useful in so far as it opens the doors to reflection of further explanatory variables, best illuminated through engagement with new lenses.

 

 

Note: The featured image contains copyrighted content (book cover). Pluriverse: a post-development dictionary, edited by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta, New Delhi, India, Tullika Books, 2019, 384 pp., $35.00 (paperback), ISBN: 9788193732984

Author: Olivia Davis