Recently, a group of high-profile economists wrote a piece for The Guardian about how growth is a doomed strategy.

The piece took a holistic look at global poverty, inequality, living wages, extraction of resources, debt servicing, Indigenous struggles and climate justice.

Such real-world issues are usually sidelined in introductory economics classes, which are typically concerned with building technical competencies — as I have written before, a problem that has been spotlighted partly through student advocacy inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement and the need to address climate change.

Concern about the viability of ongoing economic growth and about connecting the discipline of economics to real-world issues offers a chance to spotlight accessible reading about fairer economies.

Accessible, interdisciplinary reads

Books like Freakonomics or The Undercover Economist series were significant for making leisure reading about economics more popular, and for showing how traditional economic theory has relevance through everyday examples.

These types of books appeal to the contrarian in many of us. It’s fascinating to learn how financial incentives backfire — as in British India, when the British placed a bounty on cobras to cull their population in Delhi, people started farming cobras for the reward and the pest population increased.

As an economist, I want my students learning to include an awareness of the effects of systems of oppression, like inequality and racism, and what it could mean to decolonize economic thinking. I also hope they’ll engage in deep and wide reading, and experience lifelong learning.

To this end, I recommend books to my students, and my recommendations go beyond the academic discipline of economics to........

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