Is It Possible to 'Decolonize' Economics?*

By Eiman Zein-Elabdin on July 15, 2024

Calls for decolonizing disciplines, fields, even businesses have proliferated. The goals and meaning are not always clear, but any decolonizing process necessarily entails deconstructive and reconstructive tasks. In Economics, the first task must challenge dominant and domineering paradigms – orthodox and heterodox – and expose mechanisms of exclusion in the profession (Zein-Elabdin and Charusheela 2004). The constructive task, at least in part, consists of developing a theoretical vocabulary of economic meaning and well-being based on contemporary understandings of 'value' and its genetic relationship to questions of power and justice. Amartya Sen has aptly noted that "what moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate" (2009). I would argue that historical injustices, such as those brought about by colonialism or other forms of lasting domination, cannot be remedied without reconstructing the meaning of economic value and valuation. Confronting value, power, and justice as a mutually constitutive problem is a necessary step for any project of 'decolonizing' Economics.

More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen noted that "economics is helplessly behind the times" (1898). His remark then was made in reference to the rise of Anthropology and new biological sciences. Today, this statement could well serve to depict the sluggishness of Economics to engage with postcolonial critique. Nowhere is this engagement more needed than in theories of value where a contemporary view is lacking. Value is a dauntingly complex concept; it is interpretive rather than discoverable. For the sake of this argument, I broadly frame it as a reference to what enables material sustenance and general well-being. Among other things, a new theoretical framework must seek to: a) revalue different types of work, especially those performed by women and ethnic and cultural subalterns; b) recalibrate 'humans' relationship with the 'natural' world; and c) redefine 'poor' countries' contribution to life in 'rich' parts of the globe. So far, most economists have studied social disparities in income and wealth, ecological degradation, and global inequality as analytically separable problems without much attention to their common foundational reliance on major concepts of value inherited from industrial European modernity. In this brief commentary, I suggest that new, less "behind the times" interpretations of value in Economics are long overdue.