Over the last 18 months Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler and Rebecca Henderson have been convening a multi-disciplinary group of scholars working together on the subject of political economy and justice. Their goal has been to produce an intellectually coherent and potentially paradigm-changing edited volume, and their collective work has come to consolidate around a number of shared themes (as well as around several ongoing points of debate!). The shared themes include:

1. A need to re-think the relationship between politics and the economy, with attention to democratic accountability and governance regimes;
2. A need to shift the focus from distribution to production;
3. Affirmation of the value of markets coupled with varying opinions on capitalism;
4. A need to focus on broader definitions of human purpose and to build metrics for the economy around those broader definitions, for instance around the capacity of an economy to produce "good jobs." The central points of ongoing debate concern capital and growth.

At the same time they have been working in this way, several other research networks in the U.S. and Europe have been pursuing similar questions, including at the Santa Fe Institute, Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Yale, and Oxford. On Dec. 12th we will host a convening that brings these several streams of conversation together.