Opening Up Economics

[ALI KADRI <akadri_00@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Cambridge Post-graduate Students,

I found your open letter interesting and welcome it.

There are some groups in the UK which support your
cause--which I shall list below:

1.  Tony Lawson's critical realism group/workshop at
Cambridge--which I assume you know about

2.  The Post Keynesian Economics Study Group which
holds seminars about 3 times a year and which you
should attend.  For more information contact Paul
Downward at p.m.downward@xxxxxxxxxxxx or your own John
McCombie at jslm2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

3.  Association for Heterodox Economics which sponsors
a conference once a year at which all heterodox
economists in the UK gather to hear papers that
interest them.  Its web site is http://www.hetecon.com
which has lots of information that may interest you as
well as information about its upcoming
conference--such as info on the Conference for
Socialist Economists, Centre for Research in
Institutional Economics, and Postgraduate Economics
Conference.  If you are really sincere about opneing
up economics then you should attend this conference.

4.  International Working Group on Value
Theory--contact Alan Freeman at
a.freeman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Finally, if you have not already done so you might
want to read the following articles:

Lee, F. S. and Harley, S.  1998.  "Peer Review, the
Research Assessment Exercise and the Demise of
Non-Mainstream Economics."  Capital and Class 66
(Autumn):  23 - 51.

Harley, S. and Lee, F. S.  1997.  "Research
Selectivity, Managerialism, and the Academic Labor
Process:  The Future of Nonmainstream Economics in
U.K. Universities."  Human Relations 50.11 (November):
 1427 - 1460.

Sincerely,

Fred Lee
Department of Economics
University of Missouri-Kansas City


27 PhD-students at Cambridge University support the
following open letter:

Opening Up Economics:
A Proposal By Cambridge Students

As students at Cambridge University, we wish to
encourage a debate on contemporary economics. We set
out below
what we take to be characteristic of today's
economics, what we feel needs to be debated and why:

As defined by its teaching and research practices, we
believe that economics is monopolised by a single
approach to the explanation and analysis of economic
phenomena. At the heart of this approach lies a
commitment to formal modes of reasoning that must be
employed for research to be considered valid. The
evidence for this is not hard to come by. The contents
of the
discipline's major journals, of its faculties and its
courses all point in this direction.

In our opinion, the general applicability of this
formal approach to understanding economic phenomenon
is disputable. This is the debate that needs to take
place. When are these formal methods the best route to
generating good explanations? What makes these methods
useful and consequently, what are their limitations?
What other methods could be used in economics? This
debate needs to take place within economics and
between economists, rather than on the fringe of the
subject or outside of it all together.

In particular we propose the following:

1.  That the foundations of the mainstream approach be
openly debated. This requires that the bad criticisms
be rejected just as firmly as the bad defences.
Students, teachers and researchers need to know
and acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of the
mainstream approach to economics.

2.  That competing approaches to understanding
economic phenomena be subjected to the same degree of
critical debate. Where these approaches
provide significant insights into economic life, they
should be taught and their research encouraged
within economics. At the moment this is not happening.
Competing approaches have little role in economics as
it stands simply because they do not conform to the
mainstream's view of what constitutes economics. It
should be clear that such a situation is
self-enforcing.

This debate is important because in our view the
status quo
is harmful in at least four respects. Firstly, it is
harmful to students who are taught the "tools" of
mainstream
economics without learning their domain of
applicability. The source and evolution of these ideas
is ignored, as is the existence and status of
competing theories. Secondly, it disadvantages a
society that ought to be benefiting from
what economists can tell us about the world. Economics
is a social science with enormous potential for making
a difference through its impact on policy debates. In
its
present form its effectiveness in this arena is
limited by the uncritical application of mainstream
methods. Thirdly, progress towards a deeper
understanding of many
important aspects of economic life is being held back.
By restricting research done in economics to that
based on one approach only, the development of
competing research programs is seriously hampered or
prevented altogether.
Fourth and finally, in the current situation an
economist who does not do economics in the prescribed
way finds it very difficult to get recognition for her
research.

The dominance of the mainstream approach creates a
social convention in the profession that only economic
knowledge production that fits the mainstream approach
can be good research, and therefore other modes of
economic knowledge are all too easily dismissed as
simply being poor, or as not being economics. Many
economists therefore face a choice between using what
they consider inappropriate methods to answer economic
questions, or to
adopt what they consider the best methods for the
question at hand knowing that their work is unlikely
to receive a hearing from economists.

Let us conclude by emphasising what we are certainly
not proposing: we are not arguing against the
mainstream approach per se, but against the fact that
its dominance is taken for granted in the profession.
We are not arguing against mainstream methods, but
believe in a pluralism of methods and approaches
justified by debate. Pluralism as a default implies
that alternative economic work is not simply
tolerated, but that the material and social conditions
for its flourishing are met, to the same extent as is
currently the case for mainstream economics. This is
what we mean
when we refer to an "opening up" of economics.

Support or comments? E-mail cesp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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