The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World

A Conversation with Timothy Mitchell and Kaushik Basu.

• KAUSHIK BASU is Professor of Economics and Carl Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. He was Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank from 2012-16; President of the International Economic Association from 2017-21; and Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India from 2009-12. Professor Basu has published widely in the areas of development economics, industrial organization, game theory and welfare economics, and is a recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards including one of India’s highest civilian awards, the Padma Bhushan. He is the author or co-author of over twenty books including five volumes of Collected Theoretical Papers in Economics (2005-18); The Retreat of Democracy and Other Itinerant Essays on Globalization, Economics, and India (2007); Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics (2010); An Economist in the Real World: The Art of Policymaking in India (2015); and The Republic of Beliefs: A New Approach to Law and Economics (2018). His latest book, From Raisina Hill to Bretton Woods: A Policymaker’s Diary, is forthcoming this year.

• TIMOTHY MITCHELL is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University where he teaches and writes about colonialism, political economy, the politics of energy, and the making of expert knowledge. Trained in the fields of law, history, and political theory, Professor Mitchell works across the disciplinary boundaries of history and the social sciences. He is currently working on a study of durability, examining how the more durable apparatuses for capturing wealth characteristic of late nineteenth-century colonialism (railways, canals, apartment buildings, dams) engineered a new method of extracting income from the future—a future we inhabit precariously today. He is the author of numerous books and articles that have been translated into French, Turkish, Arabic and Russian including Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2012), Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (2002), Questions of Modernity [ed] (2000), and Colonizing Egypt (1991).