A Top Economist on Why We Need a New Social Contract

Minouche Shafik has spent a career straddling the worlds of government, central banking and academia. She has held senior positions in the World Bank, the U.K. government, and the International Monetary Fund, and is now director of the London School of Economics.

Having spent a lifetime studying what makes economies and societies tick, Shafik decided to put her ideas down on paper in her book What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract. The objective, she told TIME in an interview in July, was to imagine the kinds of policy prescriptions needed to keep a fragile world from pulling itself apart. “We need to think about what we owe each other at all levels of society, from how we divide up housework in the home to how we share the burden of addressing the climate crisis,” she said. “The responsibility is on us as individuals, as citizens, and on who we elect.”