000			01441nam a22001697a 4500
005			20260119104627.0
020			_a9781620979754
082			_a338.916
100			_aEverill, Bronwen.
245			_aAfriconomics _ba history of Western ignorance
260			_aNew York _bThe New Press _c2025
300			_a277p.
504			_aIncludes index
520			_aFor centuries, Westerners have tried to "fix" African economies. From the abolition of slavery onward, missionaries, philanthropists, development economists, and NGOs have arrived on the continent, full of good intentions and bad ideas. Their experiments have invariably gone awry. Historian Bronwen Everill argues that these interventions fail, and frequently cause harm, because they start from a misguided premise: that African economies just need to be more like the West. Ignoring Africa's own traditions of economic thought, Americans and Europeans assumed a set of universal economic laws that they thought could be applied anywhere. They enforced specifically Western ideas about growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, inflation, women's work, and more, and used Western metrics to find African countries wanting. The West does not know better than African nations how an economy should be run. By laying bare the myths and realities of our tangled economic history, Africonomics moves from Western ignorance to African knowledge.
650			_aAfrica, Economics
942			_cBK
999			_c11428 _d11428