Be realistic, demand the impossible!
The CHE: Mission
The crisis of our society is palpable: from soaring homelessness and rising child poverty, to increasing violence, rampant income and wealth disparity, isolation, and mental-health breakdowns. At a global level we witness growing wars and a climate collapse. The wave of dissatisfaction towards the status quo is growing, yet few institutions are equipped to channel critiques of our economy in a constructive direction.
Our serious social problems, which have a profoundly dehumanizing effect on all of us, have deep economic roots. Contrary to what some believe, our economy is neither a force of nature nor an external object that we can manipulate as if it were a machine. On the contrary, the economy is us: flesh-and-blood people.
The lens we adopt to look at the world drastically changes the questions we pose and the theories we build. This is why the Center for Heterodox Economics (CHE) is committed to fostering a space where a diversity of lenses can thrive, encouraging methodological dialogue to offer fresh insights and rethink the conventional frameworks of economic theory.
As our global society faces increasingly complex challenges, a narrow view of the economy limits our tools for making positive change. The CHE responds to the perspectives of mainstream economics. We believe that economics must be more than a set of abstract theories that operate to hide the human side of economics. Economics is not just about resources and markets—it is about how we, as a society, organize to meet human needs, distribute surplus, and promote well-being. In this light, heterodox economics is more than a critique; it is a project of envisioning and creating a better future. By integrating theory, history, and practice, we aim to collectively build the intellectual tools to understand and transform the world in which we live, work, and struggle.
The CHE has the ambitious goal of becoming a hub for achieving economic justice and a more humane society. We aim to organically combine the expertise of lived experience and the expertise of academic rigor. To counter dominant narratives, the CHE seeks to provide sturdy theoretical tools that empower and sharpen common sense. Our Center endeavors to train young scholars in the broad tradition of heterodox economics, encouraging them to learn from real life problems and engage in the world around them. The CHE breaks the walls of academia to foster popular economic agency while building transformative knowledge grounded in real-life experience. We endeavor to engage with local communities and organizers to connect academic work with real-world challenges, to collectively explore policies that enhance human dignity and ensure that economic systems serve the society, not the other way around. In this way, the CHE becomes not only an academic institution but also a platform for intervention in the concrete.
The location of our Center is significant. In Tulsa, local problems mirror global challenges: racial disparities in income and opportunity, native marginalization, and environmental decline. CHE aims to make positive interventions in our local systems as well as spurring debate on global problems.
CHE is built on the following pillars:
1. Critical Political Economy: Understanding the dynamics of power, class, and social relations that shape economic outcomes.
2. Critical History of Economic Thought and Economic History: Exploring diverse schools of thought and the historical evolution of economic systems to inform our understanding of contemporary challenges.
3. Praxis: Economics, at its core, should be about more than analysis—it should be about action. At CHE, we are dedicated to producing knowledge that not only explains the world but transforms it.
Our mission is to rethink economics—to embrace a discipline that is historically grounded, scientifically and empirically rigorous, and ethically driven. We welcome all who believe that economics should be more than a detached, technocratic exercise. Join us in our journey to develop an economics that is truly for the people.
