Why I Refused to Pretend Economics Isn’t Political
- Evan Papp
- Oct 13
- 3 min read
Rebuilding the practice uniting power, production and policy.
Imagination and dreams lead to ambitions oriented toward a horizon vision.
The Political Economy Project was born from decades of wondering why the world is the way it is and, more importantly, how we can make it better.
The Fracture
At the University of Michigan, where I studied political science and philosophy, I noticed something strange. Politics and economics were treated as separate planets orbiting different suns.
In my economics classes, we plotted supply and demand curves and memorized equations, but questions of power—who shaped those curves, who benefited and who paid were ruled out of bounds.
A decade later, in graduate school at the University of Maryland, nothing had changed. I was studying international security and economic policy, but “policy” was presented as a neutral, mathematical process, an immaculate market untouched by politics.
Then came the lecture I’ll never forget.
The Chile Moment
We were in a horseshoe-shaped auditorium. The professor stood in the pit, praising “the Miracle of Chile.”
He spoke with enthusiasm about how liberalization and privatization had supposedly saved Chile’s economy in the 1970s. Heads nodded around me.
I raised my hand. “You mention this ‘liberalization’ of Chile,” I said. “But it came through a Western-backed military coup that killed thousands and privatized the nation’s public services leaving millions destitute and shattering the democratic process.”
The professor blinked, startled. Then he unleashed a flood of IMF statistics about GDP growth rates, inflation curves, fiscal stabilization…but none of it answered my question about who decides the terms of the market and whose interests those decisions serve.
That day confirmed how academia often serves power by obscuring it as much as it studies it.
The Real World as Teacher
Outside the classroom, life taught me more about political economy than any textbook.
I worked as a law clerk in Chicago, a cook and server in restaurants, a substitute teacher in Albuquerque, a job recruiter in West Virginia, and later, I lived for years in rural Zambia and urban Jamaica.
Everywhere, I saw the same truth: markets are not abstract. They are built, regulated, and constrained by power and by politics.
Meanwhile, the world around me seemed to be unraveling.
The 9/11 operation. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The surveillance state and the so-called “War on Terror.” Then the 2008 financial collapse followed by government bailouts for the very bankers who caused it.
Reality itself was shattering the illusion that economics could ever be separated from politics.
Reclaiming a Lost Science
By the early twentieth century, the old, classical discipline of political economy once concerned with the moral, social and productive organization of nations had been fragmented into separate silos: economics, sociology, political science and international relations.
The living body was dissected and its organs studied in isolation.
The real world crises of our time like poverty, scarcity, immiseration, deindustrialization, debt, war, don’t fit neatly inside academic departments or corporate media sound bites.
Solutions demand a holistic framework, one that reunites the political and the economic into a single field of inquiry. That’s what this project is about.
The Political Economy Project
The Political Economy Project will explore how power, production, and policy intertwine across history and into our present.
We’ll examine industrial policy, agriculture, trade, education, the arts and more.
The goal isn’t to preach, but to think together—to engage, argue, learn, and imagine a horizon that orients our steps today to move toward a more prosperous and just future.
I won’t get it right all the time. But to understand is to confront our own ignorance.
Through honest and humble dialogue, we can rebuild a community of thinkers who discuss policy with both competence and conscience, leaders who see beyond ideology to the architecture of real progress.
I look forward to this journey with you.
EMP
PS
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