The Human Economy

The idea of a ‘Human Economy’ came out of an international movement inspired by the World Social Forum in 2001.  This brought activists and intellectuals together who rejected the dominant free market and command models of twentieth-century economy. These were based on abstract and impersonal models of human behaviour, remote from the concerns of people on the ground, and they left the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants in acute poverty and without meaningful freedom. A human economy would be one that gives priority to what people really do and think, while addressing the needs of humanity as a whole. A program has been set up in Pretoria, South Africa to develop research on the human economy from the perspective of the global South. A short talk will outline its aims and achievements before opening up a conversation about how a project whose academic outputs are still largely limited to words might engage the public in more contemporary ways.