Jo M. Sekimonyo is a political economist, theorist, human-rights activist, and social philosopher, the self-styled “Merchant of Ideas.” He makes economics argue with reality. Congolese-born, American-fermented, and globally bottled, he is known for puncturing comfortable myths in economic discourse and replacing them with paradigms and conceptual models validated by contemporary evidence.
Sekimonyo’s signature contribution, Ethosism, challenges the twin orthodoxies of capitalism and socialism. Reframing the 21st-century enterprise as a capability engine, he argues that relative prices reflect the quality of resources and organizational know-how more than hours worked, making labor not a cost center but a primary beneficiary of value creation. He further contends that modern business cycles are not natural swings of confidence or credit but the legacy of an old covenant over surplus distribution. Governments, in their effort to keep growth alive, rely on debt and policy maneuvers that temporarily mask the misalignment in compensation between labor and capital—an imbalance amplified by technology’s expansion of profits. Inevitably, these distortions resurface in the form of booms, busts, or bailouts.
On behavior, Sekimonyo rejects the classical preference/utility model. People are rational minimizers, often acting to avoid loss or discomfort rather than to maximize gain. His Propensity to Act (threshold) model holds that action occurs when need (sustenance), sentiment (identity/emotion), and proximity (attainability/access) combine to break indifference, explaining both stubborn inaction despite incentives and activation by small triggers. This shifts analysis from abstract utility curves to capability, context, and thresholds, offering a more realistic basis for policies, products, and interventions that actually change behavior.
Sekimonyo argues that the global debt order rests on misleading narratives and unequal instruments. He proposes a pragmatic reset that starts by acknowledge the world’s hundreds of trillions in liabilities, largely piled up by advanced economies while denying others similar fiscal latitude, reject charity-style write-offs, and inject new credit either as a nation-level $1 trillion allotment for every country or a universal $10,000 per person. While some leakage is inevitable, he contends the net effect would raise living standards, reduce extreme poverty, weaken the drivers of irregular migration, and accelerate climate progress by financing resilient infrastructure, clean energy, and adaptation, steps toward a fairer, more sustainable future.
His governance answer to democracy’s blind spots is Ideacy: an idea-first system in which policies compete in public, are piloted before scaling, scored openly, and sunset unless results justify renewal, so evidence, not identity, decides what endures.
Beyond books and essays, he leads workshops across the Global South, turning theory into debate, debate into design, and design into practice. He founded En Charge, an independent, non-partisan platform for rigorous youth civic engagement, and Université Lumumba, a mission-driven, tech-forward institution dedicated to dismantling the invisible barriers between rich and poor and between urban and rural communities through bold pedagogy and equitable access, so justice and equity become lived realities. In the DRC, his unsuccessful 2023 presidential-ballot bid sharpened his push for constitutional reforms that widen participation and anchor social and economic justice in law.
Translated into more than ten languages, his work confronts poverty, global debt, and performative egalitarianism while elevating human creativity as development’s decisive engine.
"Socialism and Communism have failed, but now Capitalism is failing us."
Jo M. Sekimonyo
