This is the introduction to the 14-part “Advice to an Aspiring Economist” series from 14 different contributors, all available at this link.

This is probably the most exciting and fruitful time ever to become an aspiring economist. Why? Because economics is reaching its Copernican Moment – the moment when it is finally becoming clear that the current ways of thinking about economic behavior are inadequate and a new way of thinking enables us to make much better sense of our world.

Space isn’t another forest or ocean to be exploited or playground for the elite. It’s a garden that calls us all to mind its vitality more wisely than we have on Earth.

If you want to change something, it is important to know how it came to be, and what upholds it now. At the root of every problem (and solution) is a perspective that upholds it through a social agreement.

On this account, the neoclassical paradigm is much more difficult to displace than the astronomical paradigm of Ptolemy … We claim that there is nothing “optimal” about the neoclassical depiction of economic behavior: it ignores some of the most important capacities of human beings – capacities that have made us so successful in the evolutionary process, namely, our capacity to cooperate with one another (often in large numbers) and our capacity to innovate, enabling us to find unpredictable solutions to the challenges we face.