Disabled people's first-person accounts of financial hardship and economic injustice as authoritative knowledge that should guide policy and practice change.
Zera Yacob's philosophy begins with the thinking individual—the person examining their own experience through reason. Applied to Money and disability, this means centering disabled people's testimony about economic life as valid, authoritative knowledge. When disabled people describe living on inadequate benefits, facing employment discrimination, or struggling to afford adaptive equipment, they are producing truth that should shape policy. Economic testimony breaks silence around disability poverty and reveals systems' failures. It counters abstract economic arguments divorced from lived reality. Furthermore, disabled people possess expertise about disability money issues that non-disabled economists and policymakers lack. This concept calls for: institutional mechanisms amplifying disabled people's economic testimony; research methodologies centered on disabled people's knowledge; policy processes where disabled people's accounts drive decision-making; and cultural practices treating economic testimony as wisdom. By honoring disabled people's voices as authoritative on their own economic conditions, following Zera Yacob's vision of reason emerging from each person's experience, we create possibilities for genuine economic justice.
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