This summer issue of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter...
This summer issue of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter includes many, recently published journal items. So you can pick a great variety of refreshing holiday reads out of this newsletter-issue ;-)
Additionally, I wanted to point you to a recent report of the French Association of Political Economy (FAPE/AFEP), which analyzes recent trends in economics professors’ recruitment in France. It shows a remarkable decline in hirings of economists with a heterodox orientation in research and teaching - a result summarized in the paper’s subtitle as “the end of pluralism”. The authors find that especially bibliometric evaluation-routines contribute to the decline in heterodox hirings. This result comes as no surprise since citation metrics have, beside many other drawbacks, a significant size-bias (the more voluminous literature is automatically judged as being of higher quality). While this finding confirms some prior theoretical predictions related to institutional lock-in in economics, it also dampens the prospects of heterodox economics. These developments are the main reason why the Heterodox Economics Newsletter provides a series of journal and department rankings, which are based on some past work of Frederic S. Lee (accessible here and here), on this page here.
A counterpoint to all this is provided, again, by the students of economics. Recently, a group of econ-students based at the University of Hamburg have put together a “Pluralist Economics Reader”, which aims at giving a general, yet concise and accessible introduction to heterodox and pluralist economic thought. I had a look at their final result and found they succeeded well in this admittedly difficult task.
All the Best!
Jakob