Last week I was invited to participate in...
Last week I was invited to participate in a conference on “Still rethinking? - The Need for Pluralism in Economics” organized by the Rethinking Economics Group at Greenwich University. This was a student-led conference and the organization of the sessions reflected that in a very inspiring way: more experienced scholars were invited to give broad and accessible introductions to various aspects of heterodox thought to make it easier for students to enter the respective, more specialized debates at the research frontier. In my view, this conference was a huge success and I was extremely honored to present some of my views on the future of pluralism in economics in a panel together with the living legend Victoria Chick.
Having said that, I wanted to emphasize that I also found Michael Kumhof’s keynote lecture at said conference to be highly interesting as he tackled interparadigmatic conflicts very directly. For instance, Kumhof showed how correctly modeling the inner workings of the financial sector (by means of assuming endogenous money) indeed makes a difference for the model outcomes. Moreover, he emphasized that research “outside-the-box” is often not conducted, because it is associated with too much “professional risk”. This assessment echoes what I often write on these pages about paradigmatic closure in economics (e.g. here), but also relates to general questions of professional climate and concerns for diversity within economics.
On the latter point, I wanted you to notice that the AEA has recently released a letter to its members to provide a preliminary assessment and discussion of a survey on the professional climate in economics. As theoretical lop-sidedness and lack of diversity are often intrinsically related (I gave an example for such a case in my last editorial), I think that these efforts by the AEA are noteworthy as they allow us to not only get a better understandings of the inner workings of academic economics, but they also facilitate a discussion on possible ‘blind spots’ in current mainstream thought. And this is, at the end of the day, exactly what this Newsletter is all about ;-)
All the best,
Jakob