Why Economics Can't Explain Poverty — It Was Designed Not To | Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven
March 18, 2026
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51:06Now PlayingWhy Economics Can't Explain Poverty — It Was Designed Not To | Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven
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as posted by the channelOxfam reports the super rich in the Global North extracted over $30 million per hour from the Global South in 2024. So why does mainstream economics keep telling these countries they just need better institutions?
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven (Senior Lecturer in International Development, King's College London; co-author of Decolonizing Economics) explains how the economics discipline systematically erases colonialism, imperialism, and uneven development from its models — and what that erasure costs the majority of people on the planet.
In this episode of the FREE Podcast (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation), Clara Mattei and Ingrid break down:
• How Eurocentrism operates as a structural bias inside economic theory
• Why Nobel Prize-winning frameworks like Acemoglu and Robinson still blame the Global South for its own poverty
• How "institutional reform" functions as a cover for extraction
• The case of Ghana's Ashanti Goldfields: 125+ years of colonialism, financialization, dispossession, and forced mergers
• How the IMF, World Bank, and structural adjustment deepen underdevelopment•
• International financial subordination: why Global South countries pay more to borrow, hold dollars they don't control, and lose domestic firms to multinational competition
• Why development economics narrows the lens to individual behavior instead of confronting the global system
• The Nobel Prize in Economics as a political instrument
• What decolonizing economics actually requires — and why it's a political project, not an academic exercise
Guest links:
📚 Decolonizing EconomicsAn Introduction
📄 Cracks in the Gold Standard (new article on mining & development in Ghana)
🌐 Ingrid's website
📝 Developing Economics blog
🤝 Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (DEcon)
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#decolonizingeconomics #globalsouth #capitalism #imperialism #developmenteconomics #Ghana #NobelPrize #IMF #WorldBank #structuraladjustment #freepodcast #ClaraMattei #economics #unevendevelopment
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