Hello and welcome to the conversation from the BBC World Service,
the programme that brings together women from different countries to share their insights and expertise.
I'm Ella Oshomahi and today I'm joined by two women from India and Denmark who are challenging mainstream economics.
Joyiti Ghosh is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the United States,
a feminist economist she's advised governments in India and other countries and written many books with a focus on informal workers in the global south.
Emma Holton is from Denmark.
Her book, Deficit, How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World, was a bestseller in her home country in 2024.
Ladies, welcome to you both.
Thank you.
Thank you, it's a pleasure.
Can we start off with the basics?
Joyiti, how would you define economics in the simplest of terms?
Economics is or should be about how people and societies deal with the material world around them,
how they deal with each other through their relationships,
whether they are transactions or whether they are also just different ways of interacting that generate activity.
We've made it something much smaller and something more rigid and perhaps less interesting.
We've made economics into a study of only the transactions instead of looking at the relationship of humanity with society,
with nature, with each other.
And Emma, how would you define it?
I think Joyiti did quite well.