Invisible Handcuffs: Unchaining Economics

Invisible Handcuffs: Unchaining Economics

By Katy ShieldsSociety & CultureDocumentaryScienceSocial SciencesEducation
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Invisible Handcuffs: Unchaining Economics episodes

  • Episode 08: How economics education limits our understanding of what is possible with Stefan Pühringer and Theresa Hager

    Hager, Theresa; Pühringer, Stephan (2023) : Gendered competitive practices in

    economics: A multi-layer model of women's underrepresentation, ICAE Working Paper Series, No.148, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy (ICAE), Linz
    https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/274018/1/1855950596.pdf

    Pühringer, Stephan; Bäuerle, Lukas (2018) : What economics education is

    missing: The real world, Working Paper Serie, No. Ök-37, Cusanus Hochschule, Institut für
    Ökonomie und Institut für Philosophie, Bernkastel-Kues
    https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/196159/1/oek37.pdf

    https://www.jku.at/en/institute-for-comprehensive-analysis-of-the-economy/

    https://www.jku.at/en/institute-for-comprehensive-analysis-of-the-economy/projects/socio-ecological-transformation-lab/

    59 min
  • Episode 07: What economists get wrong about risk, technology and progress with Luke Kemp
    Or, how innovation without collective struggle is just feeding tech-bro fantasies
    In what way might economists’ flawed understanding of progress be driving the many risks we face today?
    This episode's guest is Luke Kemp, Research Affiliate at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Existential Risk and author of the best-selling, critically acclaimed book Goliath’s Curse, The History and Future of Societal Collapse.
    Luke actually trained and worked as a climate economist.
    Indeed he was drawn to researching civilisational collapse when he saw that climate economic models were tending to look only at average trajectories and not so-called tail risks — these are the worst case outcomes which may have a smaller probability, but could be potentially catastrophic.
    But to understand civilisational risk he realised he had to define what civilizations actually are. And this is where his work actually becomes highly relevant for understanding the ways in which economics is going wrong today, and how we might be able to fix it.
    Many of us, not just economists, equate civilisation with progress. That Hobbesian idea that life was nasty, brutish and short until the civilising force of states and empires came and liberated us.
    But when Luke started to dig into these periods he found contradictory evidence.
    Rather than being times of human flourishing, health and wellbeing actually tends to fall overall, while ecological degradation, resource conflicts, inflation, violence all tend to rise.
    So they were not really civil times in the sense we might understand the word today — but structured around what Luke terms dominance hierarchies - dominance of humans over nature, men over women, rich over poor, master over slave.
    It might have been good for elites, who got to hoard all the wealth and power — but not the broader population. Indeed, when these civilisations fall, most people tend to be better off. Hence Luke developed his preferred term: Goliaths.
    Well, today Luke claims we’re living in a Global Goliath, the period that effectively started with the industrial revolution.
    And this is where we make the link with economics, because much of economics takes the hockey-stick view of human progress as effectively starting a few hundred years ago, with industrialisation, which led to this massive expansion in the global economy, in wealth and so-called progress.
    And no doubt, a lot of good has come out of it. Especially since WWII life expectancy, nutrition etc has improved.
    But again, that’s not the whole story. Luke has found that for much of the industrial revolution, like past “Goliaths”, life was pretty terrible for most people, in many ways worse than before. It wasn’t until democratic struggle — labour movements, suffragettes, civil rights movements — that populations more broadly were able to benefit from the innovation, from this “progress”.
    So what does that mean for today?
    In my earlier discussion with economist Steve Keen we talked about how economists’ obsession with innovation as the key driver of growth overlooked that all technology requires energy.
    Luke's analysis helps us see that part of the reason why economists ignored and continue to ignore energy and nature stems from the idea that we can dominate nature, as well as a view of history effectively written by elites who have benefited from innovation and growth.
    Not only do such models ignore nature, but they ignore the social movements so critical to ensuring that innovations benefit people more broadly.
    And they also ignore the externalities —because each technology brings new problems.
    And yet today we still see economic models betting on innovation as the core means of producing growth, with growth overall necessarily assumed to be good, whatever the risks — not least as concerns AI — Luke's latest area of research, which we get to towards the end of the discussion.
    If you enjoy this episode, please like and share far and wide and consider a free or paid subscription at invisiblehandcuffs.com.
    1 hr 2 min
  • Episode 06: How Eurocentrism in economics locks women and the Global South in crisis with Bhumika Muchhala
    And why the fight for economic justice must include epistemic justice

    (1) Muchhala, Bhumika. (2026). "Obligations Beyond Borders? Linking Monetary Tightening in the US to Gendered Debt Crisis in Pakistan Through Extraterritorial Obligations." Feminist Economics, 32(2), 89–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2026.2646413

    (2) Muchhala, Bhumika. (2026). "Situating Sovereign Debt Within the Climate–Debt Cycle: The colonial origins, financial hierarchy and epistemic roots of debt in the Global South." In: Bell, K. et al (eds) The Sage Handbook of Eco-Social Policy and Politics, edited by Karen Bell, et al., SAGE Publications: London. https://us2.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-sage-handbook-of-eco-social-policy-and-politics/book288440#contents

    (3) Muchhala, Bhumika. (2022). "Gendered Austerity and Embodied Debt in Ecuador: Channels through which women absorb and resist the shocks of public budget cuts." Gender & Development vol. 30, no. 1-2, pp. 283-309. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2022.207199 --- and related: Muchhala, Bhumika. (2023). A Feminist Social Contract Rooted in Fiscal Justice (Third World Network briefing paper)

    (4) Muchhala, Bhumika. (2024). "A Feminist and Decolonial Global Green New Deal: Principles, Paradigms and Systemic Transformations." Righting the Economy: A Global Green New Deal, Agenda Publishing, pp. 171-184. 2)

    (5) Co-authored: Dempsey, Jessica, et al. (2022). "Biodiversity Targets Will Not Be Met Without Debt and Tax Justice." Nature Ecology & Evolution, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 237-39. Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01619-5.

    (6) Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, and Bhumika Muchhala. (2020). "The Southern Origins of Sustainable Development Goals: Ideas, actors, aspirations." World Development, vol. 126, 104706. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104706.

    (7) Muchhala, Bhumika. (2022). "The Structural Power of the State-Finance Nexus: Systemic delinking for the right to development." Development, vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 124–135. Palgrave Macmillan, DOI:10.1057/s41301-022-00343-2.

    (8) Muchhala, Bhumika. (2025). "Examining the Features of Economic Colonialism Through Decoloniality and Dependency: Epistemic singularity and unequal power in global finance." In: Sanchez, P.Z.M.U., Imbong, R.A.D., Chew, M.Mt., Schöpf, C.M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on Decoloniality in Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-2336-5_12

    (9) Bandung Woods (Progressive International, January 2023)

    (10) Muchhala, Bhumika, Miranda, Patricia, Syed, Maria and Jorge Luna. (2026). Dancing to their Tune: Credit rating agencies, sovereign risk and financing conditions in the Global South (Third World Network and Latin American Network on Debt and Development briefing paper, June 2026) & related: Muchhala, Bhumika and Maria Syed (2026). “Policy Profile 5.2: Curbing the dominance of private credit ratings agencies through multilateral credit rating." In The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth: Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter. New Economies Eradicating Poverty, June 2026.

    1 hr 17 min
  • Episode 05: From Flat-Earth Economics to Social-Ecological Economics with Clive Spash
    Using philosophy of science to deconstruct mainstream economics and create an economics for people and planet
    How can philosophy of science help us in the fight to reclaim economics?
    That is the topic of discussion in our latest episode of Invisible Handcuffs, where I was delighted to be joined by leading a social-ecological economist Clive Spash.
    This discussion brought a whole new language to problems with economics that I have long sensed, but been unable to put into words.
    We delve deep into philosophy of science which Clive argues is crucial not just for deconstructing mainstream economics - which Clive says is literally walking us into disaster - but also, if we wish to build a new economics that can offer viable alternatives to the extractive and exploitative economies we have today.
    We also take time to discuss Clive’s route into ecological economics via environmental activism, and then later, to social-ecological economics which integrates social justice, incorporating aspects such as ethics, decolonialism and care.
    We also discuss links with other heterodox economics disciplines with Clive explaining how he hopes social-ecological economics could become a unifying social science that informs new approaches seeking to meet genuine needs within the earth’s finite limits.
    –
    Note, this episode comes after a short and partly unplanned break due to heatwaves and other unforeseen personal circumstances. For the summer we’re going to be switching to a biweekly schedule and will also be posting ad-hoc context related to our upcoming documentary. To be sure to receive the latest content to your inbox you can sign up at www.invisiblehandcuffs.com. This also helps the algorithm ensure others find out work.
    1 hr 13 min
  • Episode 03: Why the fight to reclaim economics needs feminist economists with Emma Holten
    My guest this week is Emma Holten. Emma is a feminist economist from Denmark and the author of a best-selling book, Deficit.
    Feminist economics, as Emma explains, is the study of the unhidden but vital work of ‘reproduction’ - that textured, often unquantifiable work that goes into making everything else in life, including economic life, possible: care, repair, love, friendship, compassion. But, that which doesn’t lend itself to being monetised and moulded into the kinds of models used by economists today, which have to prove their contribution to economic growth, but without which, no economic growth would be possible.
    Emma was motivated to become a feminist economist after a life-saving stay in hospital made her acutely aware of the value of care that is so fundamental to human survival, let alone economic survival, but often missing from economic models.
    As she put it, every euro she earned and contributed to economic growth following that week is directly attributed to the care she received, often from nurses on close to minimum wage.
    In this interview we talk about the ‘origin story’ of modern economics, starting in the enlightenment era and how early (male) economists wanted to be able to make clean and neat rational models just like the Newtonian physics. The messy work of care, mostly done by women, didn’t make the cut.
    More intriguing - and importantly - though is how this is upheld today, how we have arguably gone backwards in the past decades, as neoliberal ideology has captured mainstream economics. Models like cost-benefit analyses, used across government departments, are predicated on being able to prove the short-term, upfront ‘return on investment’, not the longer-term, often hard-to-measure but crucial benefits of reproduction.
    Even where care work is paid, thanks further injustices hidden in our economic systems and models, it is often underpaid. This is possible partly because, enabling more (white) women to ‘join the professional workforce’ has required a hidden army of unpaid or underpaid (black, brown, migrant) women taking on the work of care.
    As such, the very ‘liberal’ movement that was meant also to liberate women and minorities, ends up reinforcing these very injustices.
    We end by discussing reactions by the economic mainstream. How, thanks to a generation of economists who have been schooled only in the orthodoxy, such economists are not used to have their assumptions challenged - leading to quite wild reactions to Emma’s book.
    Challenging these assumptions, Emma says, requires all hands on deck - within and outside of the heterodox economics movement.
    Find out more about Emma’s work here: https://www.emmaholten.com/
    You can listen to our first two episodes and find out more about our project here: https://www.invisiblehandcuffs.com/
    47 min
  • Episode 02: Why economists need multiple perspectives with John T Harvey
    This podcast is all about freeing ourselves from the chains of economic orthodoxy: the set of ideas that drive most decisions in governments, institutions around the world and thus are also underpin our crises.
    But where do these ideas come from, and why do they persist? What might alternative schools have to offer? And if such alternative perspectives could offer solutions, why are they not more widely taught?
    That is the topic of this week’s discussion with Professor John T Harvey of Texas Christian University.
    Unlike most economics student John was fortunate enough to have been exposed to a range of thought schools in his own economics education, which, as he explains, made him want to be an economics professor.
    He then went on to write a textbook on the various economic thoughts schools, mainly, as he discovered none existed. In this episode we discuss some key schools and how they compare to the 'neoclassical' school, from Marxisim to (post-)Keynesianism, Institutional, Feminist and Ecological Economics.
    John makes the point that education, especially in social sciences, should be all about questioning, critiquing, and exploring alternative points of view. Yet in economics, particularly as it is taught in high schools and at undergrad today, there is no such debate.
    Students are presented with mathematical models and abstract formulae as if they are natural laws and 'assumptions', like individualism and profit-maximisation, are treated as universal even though they may not reflect the values or cultures of much of the human population.
    John and I discuss some of the outcomes: disengagement, self-selection bias and an economics which is among the least diverse of any discipline.
    We also get into the history of why this is - why, despite growing critiques, neoclassicism persists; the confluence of historical factors and the ways in which various incentive systems, like journal and university rankings, uphold it today.
    We end by discussing what can be done, from ensuring that heterodox economists keep fighting to 'keep ideas alive', to the role of student movements, to what we can achieve by engaging directly engaging with decision-makers and the broader public.
    Find out more about John's book here:
    https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/contending-perspectives-in-economics-9781789900484.html?srsltid=AfmBOoqCNYwAcSxGx6lwVMmKD6J9fnSmIqB4WmOZ52H_9LVB1czks618
    1 hr 21 min

About Invisible Handcuffs: Unchaining Economics

From the publisher's feed

Invisible Handcuffs is podcast series and documentary-in-the-making, hosted by Katy Shields, about how we can free ourselves from the economic ideology driving our crises.