Heterodox Economics

I think it is fair to say that I think economics is a poorly regarded discipline in modern society.

The media defer to economists for easy economic analysis for their papers (nowadays they no longer have any journalists with serious economic abilities) and of course there is the ever-present awe of magicians who can summarise complex economic problems into figures.

But, entirely deservedly, economics has a pretty poor reputation today. The stereotype of an economist is a bespectacled socially-awkward suit-and-tied (which is why economists like Gareth Morgan are able to get people to listen to them: they look and sound normal!).

As I noted in a previous post, I find the mathematicisation of social sciences pretty repulsive. The Visible Hand in Economics jokingly noted that I had no statistical evidence to prove such an assumption. The comment was in just in his case, but it does ironically highlight the worst problem that most economists have: that is, they think entirely statistics and view society, love and all the other primary drivers of human behaviour as 'externalities' on the operation of physically and mathematically perfect markets.

This, now dominant, paradigm in economic thought emerged from the 'neo-classical' school of economics. It works around perfect conditions and universal application of models and theories developed many years ago to any economic problem, believing history, society and all sorts of other factors undermine the 'homo economicus', or the supposedly rational profit-driven man who thinks entirely in his own self-interest and only helps others when they can help him.

There are new trends emerging, luckily, that are fighting against the highly individualist and ridiculously theoretical approaches that ignore history, social institutions and all the truly important parts of human existence.

Heterodox economics is the umbrella term for those who come from varying economic backgrounds to the dominant hard right school of thought: Marxist approaches, environmental and bio-economics, institutional political economists (like myself), and various other tendencies of economic thought that challenge the neo-classical consensus in economics departments in education institutions and in literature all over the Western world. The Post-Austistic Economics Review and the Heterodox Economics Newsletter are definitely worth checking out.

As I love to quote J.B. Condliffe, 'economics is common sense made difficult'. The next time you're chatting to someone who thinks they're Jesus Christ incarnate with their knowledge of free markets, rational consumer behaviour and econometrics, argue with them.

Tell them that their understanding of economics is not science, it's just an opinion like yours. Argue that people construct markets, we constructed the free market, we constructed capitalism and socialism. We constructed rational utility-maximising individuals. They will insist that they are right, that their theories are infallible because economists in their European and American universities tell them so.

We must tell them the truth: society and 'irrational' human emotion are natural to humans, history should be an important part of how we understand the present, and the social effects of Margaret Thatcher was fuelled by fundamentalist economic drivel when she said that 'society does not exist'.

No one can remove the right of you to have opinions about working, who gets what goods in society and how we organise our entire economic system. Start reading heterodox economics newsletters: we're on a crusade to bring economics back down to reality and as a social science that tolerates dissent.