Issues ranging from climate change, to widening economic inequalities, to AI, challenge many tenets and orthodoxies in economics. A cogent argument exists for paradigmatic change in economic theory and practice, based on a combination of complex systems science, evolutionary science, and modern understandings of human well-being. Over the past decades these ideas have been increasingly well developed in academia, but thus far have failed to result in paradigmatic change. A way forward is to treat paradigmatic change as itself an exercise in multilevel cultural evolution. Leading evolutionary theorist Prof. David Sloan Wilson will summarise this strategy, based on a new series of articles, co-authored with the economist Prof. Dennis Snower, titled Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Economics. Prof. Sloan Wilson will argue that paradigmatic change is indeed possible, even if it has been elusive in the past.

A panel of leading thinkers on new economic paradigms, Prof. Sir Paul Collier (co-author of Greed is Dead), Prof. Rebecca Henderson (author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire), and Nick Hanauer (entrepreneur, civic activist, and co-author of The Gardens of Democracy), will discuss the issues raised in the talk, and Prof. Eric Beinhocker (author of The Origin of Wealth), will moderate a discussion and debate with the audience.