Earlier this year, we at Marketplace commissioned a poll to measure economic insecurity. As you might expect, given the pandemic, the Marketplace-Edison Research Economic Anxiety Index® rose by the most we’d ever seen. But here’s the thing: For people earning $25,000 a year or less, their financial anxiety didn’t go up. It was flat compared to last year. Experts see that as evidence low-income people were already living with pandemic levels of economic insecurity well before the first COVID-19 case showed up in the U.S. And folks earning $25,000 or less every year make up one-fifth of Americans.

It’s clear the system that provides our livelihoods, the economy, could do better. This moment — the combination of the pandemic and the renewed energy of the social justice movement — is prompting many to say now is the time to consider new ideas. Policies and strategies that may have seemed unthinkable in the “before times”— ideas to go beyond economic recovery and toward a system that works better for more people.

The aim of this special is to explore some of these surprising and potentially transformative ideas. For help with that, we turned to a diverse set of big thinkers.

For further reading, here are the sources that went into making “The Economy Reimagined,” a Marketplace special report.

• “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities,” by Andre M. Perry

• “Angrynomics,” by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth

• “The Case for a Job Guarantee,” by Pavlina Tcherneva

• “After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back,” by Juliet Schor

• “The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality,” by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles

• “2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything,” by Mauro Guillén

• “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,” by Michael Braungart and William McDonough

• “The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail,” by Ray Dalio (forthcoming)

• “From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth,” by Darren Walker

You can hear the full special here.