In a world increasingly defined by climate crises and social inequality, our economic frameworks need profound reimagining. A fascinating video from 2017 explores how poetry and creative vision might offer us pathways to a more sustainable and humane economy—an insight that feels even more relevant today in 2025. The video can be seen here and starts with a song created by one of the authors.
The Forgotten Wisdom of Poetic Economics
The concept of “poetic economics” may sound unusual to those accustomed to viewing economics as a purely mathematical discipline. Yet this explores how creative, aesthetic, and ethical knowledge can transform our economic systems to offer fresh perspectives on our most pressing challenges.
The 2018 a collaboration between Peter Bradley and Sebastian Berger emerged from over a decade of shared exploration. This discussion demonstrates how economics can be re-rooted in humanities, particularly poetry, creating frameworks that recognize both “the nature of reality” and “the reality of nature”—elements often overlooked in conventional economic thinking.
A Timely Rediscovery
What makes this video particularly significant in 2025 is how it anticipated the growing recognition that social sentiment for sustainable economics is not merely supplementary but fundamental to meaningful and supportive change. The video on poetic economics corroborates the recent findings that social sentiment for a sustainable economy is crucial.
What’s often overlooked in contemporary discussions about economic sustainability, including in recent commentary from political figures like Tony Blair (BBC); is that rationality itself is deeply context-specific. What appears rational in one social or environmental context may be entirely irrational in another. This understanding of situated rationality, extensively explored in Vatn’s paper (2005) and further developed in relation to sustainable economies by Bradley et al. (2021), suggests that our economic models must acknowledge diverse forms of rationality shaped by specific cultural, social, and ecological circumstances. The poetic economics approach presented in the video inherently recognizes this plurality of rational perspectives, offering a more inclusive foundation for sustainable economic transformation than approaches assuming a single universal rationality.
The video examines how socio-ecological economist K. William Kapp’s work drew inspiration from Ernst Wiechert’s art philosophy, novels, and poetry—demonstrating how humanistic sensibilities can inform economic theory and practice.
Poetic economics makes economics more humane, edifying, and sensitive to both natural and social environments. By transcending the limitations of economics as a “dismal science,” this approach invites us to consider not just what is profitable, but what is possible when we bring our full creative potential to bear on our economic challenges.
