The Center for Political Economy was launched in 2022 at Columbia World Projects with two primary goals: to identify and advance the most promising developments within economics since the financial meltdown of 2008 and to promote a new political economy with robust philosophical underpinnings.
"The Center offers an extraordinary opportunity to combine scholarly expertise across disciplines with the perspectives of practitioners to galvanize understanding and shape ideas that promise to advance human welfare."
The economic shocks generated by the financial meltdown of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic have challenged the status quo. Numerous issues have called into question the adequacy of inherited economic frameworks, especially radical market-based approaches that often go hand in hand with budgetary austerity, as well as soaring inequalities, inadequate investments in public good, and global supply chain limitations.
As scholars grapple with questions of power, inequality and uncertainty, a new intellectual movement is unfolding, marked by the emergence of post-neoliberal theory and an empirical turn in applied research. This movement breaks free from a fixation on efficiency as the primary criterion to evaluate market outcomes. Scholarship concerning political economy now brings economics into conversation with other disciplines, as scholars respond to the multiple dimensions of inequality — attending not only to vital assets like housing and medical care, but also to access to dignity and respect, heightened political and economic uncertainty, and fractured institutions.
The Columbia Center for Political Economy is motivated by these contemporary circumstances, confident that renewed thinking in economics and interdisciplinary engagement can generate practical policy ideas that advance prospects to secure and share prosperity, sustain the environment, and undergird representative democracy.
Supported by the Hewlett Foundation and housed within Columbia Global at Columbia University, the center expands upon existing Columbia initiatives, seeding new research, scholarly publications, policy briefs, curricular materials and networks of scholars and practitioners within and beyond the university. At the core of the center's activities are “Idea Labs,” serving as intellectual and policy incubators across distinct themes.