Education is riddled with market failures. We know so. We teach this. This reality calls for non-market interventions. It screams for democratization. What shape and form democratization should take is exactly what ReThink is currently discussing. We should therefore not stay silent anymore, if only because rethinking the academic enterprise is too important to be left entirely to non-economists. Everybody should engage. In the end, Dutch economist Hennipman taught at the UvA’s economics faculty that taking a broad welfare perspective implies that profit is not the same as welfare. That made Hennipman a critic of rendementsdenken avant-la-lettre. Of course, many economics departments -including UvA- already don’t teach the history of economics anymore, so we also don’t teach Hennipman. The irony is that his lesson is one that we cannot afford to forget.

David Hollanders: Why economists should engage with ReThink