Rethinking Economics: From the UK, a Global Student Movement Takes Shape

Sunday, 02 February 2014 10:13
By Ruby Russell, Occupy.com | News Analysis

When the financial crisis hit in 2007, economics students at respected institutions around the world found that theories handed down in classrooms failed to explain the reality outside, and an international movement began to demand a change in the way economics is taught.

“The crash was a wake-up call,” says Yuan Yang, who started her undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, at the height of the crisis in 2008. “On the one hand, we were being taught as if the financial system was not an important part of the economy. And on the other hand, what the markets were doing was quite different, so we asked, 'Why is there this disconnect?'”