Eurocentrism! In Economics?

The study of economics is very Eurocentric. This is reinforced by the reading in the History of Economic thought where once we get past the Physiocrats we’re really talking more about the history of economic thought in England – Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Bentham, Say, Senior, Mill. Bastiat is Frenchy, so he’s the outlier. Marx was from Trier but he popped on over to France and then the image of Marx is him huddled over books in the reading room of the British Museum. He lived and died in England and sponged off an Engles-man.

We don't even know Ho over here either

And it doesn’t just stop there and spread out. I looked at the list of Economic Nobel winners (and real Nobel or not, it does represent the top line of the consensus of the more orthodox line of thought) and there is one person not from Europe or the Americas. And even then, Amartya Sen was educated in the Western system. That’s weird, right? This is subjective, but I can only think of a handful of people outside of this structure, some Aussies and a couple of Japanese Marxists.

So the question is why this is. Why did it begin that way and why does it persist? In a way I can understand why the Fathers of Economics are where capitalism started. You’re not going to study something as a system if you’re not close to it. And then if you are looking at how society reproduces itself in a non-capitalist or pre-capitalist system, what you are writing has no worth as capitalism took over the world. But where are the non-European or American economists? Are they, like Sen, pulled to the western canon and system? Do they exist but are marginalized? Or are they just not there? Who is the sub-Saharan Samuelson, the African Arrow, and the Thai Thaler? Should we be doing what we can to help create these people, and why haven’t we?