A History of Western Ignorance: Why We Need to Think Differently About African Economics – Africonomics with Bronwen Everill

Episode 154 with Bronwen Everill who was a fellow of Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge from 2015 and was the Director of Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies. In August, she joined the faculty of the Princeton Writing Program. She is a visiting fellow at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past, in the Department of Economics at Stellenbosh University.

Bronwen recently publishing Africonomics, which is a short, bold story of Western economic thought about Africa. Bronwen argues that these interventions fail because they start from a misguided premise: that African economies just need to be more like the West. Ignoring Africa's own traditions of economic thought, Europeans and Americans assumed a set of universal economic laws that they thought could be applied anywhere. They enforced specifically Western ideas about growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, inflation, women’s work and more, and used Western metrics to find African countries wanting. The West does not know better than African nations how an economy should be run. By laying bare the myths and realities of our tangled economic history, Africonomics moves from Western ignorance to African knowledge.

What We Discuss With Bronwen

• In what ways does Africonomics challenge conventional Western views of African economies?
• How have historical misconceptions about African wealth shaped Western interventions on the continent?
• How did Western economic policies during colonial times disregard Africa’s indigenous economic systems?
• How have Western metrics like GDP distorted perceptions of Africa's economic success or challenges?
• Examples of African traditions of economic thought that have been overlooked by Western interventions.

Did you miss my previous episode where I discuss Powering Congo: Using Recycled Materials to Create Cutting-Edge Battery Technology for Businesses and Households? Make sure to check it out!

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