Hi, Alberto!
The conference is starting, so I am hopeful.
I teach economics at Houston Community College, and have been writing on the interaction of early and classic science fiction and macroeconomics (micro, inventions, etc, have been covered ad nauseum).
My feeling about the economics profession and economists is that there is a lot of discussion about how to change how it is taught and what is taught, and a lot of desire to come up with better systems. No one wants a repeat of the disaster of 2008, but the complexity of actual economic systems and the wide variety of proposals means we don’t have anything new that has caught a preponderance of opinions.
The Left is hoping to foment the class war they have always wanted, and this worries me (aside from the potential for violence), because I have seen little evidence that most governments have not allocated resources more efficiently or justly than the private sector.
It seems to me that the education of children is the MOST important means to change the future – NOT the short term political process, so I think developing and implementing a curriculum of social solidarity which is not based on nationalism is critical, and even one which is built around the consideration of humans as part of the ecology and applying that to all aspects of what schools do – how does our language treat nature, how does our science treat nature, how do our societies treat nature, etc. And this will enable us to develop an economic system, based on what we can realistically do as human psychological actors. A lot of proposals are built around humans that are better than we are – socialist systems so far have utterly failed because they were forced down the throats of people who want to see direct benefit from their labor, rather than altruistic benefits to people they don’t know. We need to deal with human feelings by expanding the compass of who is “us” – not artificially by force but organically by education.
So the psychology and sociology necessarily precede the change in economics, in my view.