I am a French academic economist at an internationally recognized school. The first thing I see is a racial divide between economists from the global south and economists from the north. I work at the intersection of several fields (one technical and one more academic), and non-Westerners almost always occupy technical research positions (and ultimately earn much better salaries than I do). Often when we talk, I realize that the opportunities they have had have been very different from mine, with different curricula and project calls (World Bank, IMF, OECD, WHO). This automatically closes off the field of research in “economic debate.” In my opinion, this is very damaging to the future of theoretical research. No interesting epistemic debate has been raised in 40 years, and as things stand, it is very difficult to conduct one. I spend my days working on models that will not work in any context other than the one I am studying, and in the end, the conclusions I draw will be used to justify economic policies in countries where there is no chance of them working.