Just after INET finished hosting hundreds of developing economic thinkers at its annual conference in Berlin as part of INET’s YSI Commons program, The New York Times Dot Earth blog picked up on an emerging trend that we’ve been seeing up close for months now: The growing youth movement to transform economics.
In a post called “Young People Tire of Old Economic Models,” The Times discussed how economics students have begun to push back against the stale ideas that were proven wrong during the recent financial crisis. The post includes quotes from several young scholars speaking at length about what’s wrong with economics. As one of the students wrote in an email to reporter Andrew Revkin: “It’s great to see a new paradigm slowly making its way into the mainstream.”
The post also amplified a thread from a recent op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times written by INET Senior Editor and Director of Communications Eric J. Weiner, which linked the burgeoning economics student movement to the walkout of Prof. Greg Mankiw’s introductory economics class at Harvard last November.