"Your intention is obviously counter-cultural, and god knows how this will land" - this sentence from a referee report about an earlier version of this editorial nicely captures the spirit of the heterodox project.

“Your intention is obviously counter-cultural, and god knows the current culture has to be changed.”
(Robert Solow in an early letter to the founders of the Review of Keynesian Economics)

While the above quote is more than a decade old – indeed, the Review of Keynesian Economics has already seen the publication of its 11th Volume – the gist of Solow’s statement is still well-suited to describe the current state of our discipline. Also, the founding of the Review of Keynesian Economics closely resembles a long-term historical trend of ‘heterodox journal diaspora’, that probably started in the 1960s (which witnessed the emergence of the Journal of Economic Issues as well as the Review of Radical Political Economics as first responses to increasing mainstream closure and ignorance).

While the creation of heterodox outlets is of huge importance to push to the inner development of heterodox thinking and theorizing, any successful counter-culture requires not only such a safe base, but also some means to create broader networks and, at least occasionally, wide visibility. In this context, we can observe that heterodox scholars occasionally manage to achieve such visibility by publishing in highly regarded interdisciplinary journals with a strong base in the natural sciences such as Science or Nature (examples can be found here, here, here, or there; the latter is an especially recent one).

Given the slow pace of change within the economic discipline, such exit options could probably be more widely appreciated by heterodox scholars of diverse strands – and also contribute to speeding up change within economics as such more ‘general’ contributions are not so easily ignored by the mainstream as a publication in a classic heterodox outlet.

In closing, one can observe that this additional exit option could well be related to the fact that the disciplinary boundaries between heterodox economics and the natural sciences become less tight. I remember that, twenty years ago, it was much more difficult to convince colleagues from the natural sciences that much of standard economics acts as a barrier to social progress. However, against the backdrop of how mainstream economics addresses the issue of ongoing climate heating, the intuition that something is fundamentally at odds with economics has become more widely accepted across all branches of science. As a consequence the problem-driven boundaries of (inter)disciplinary academic conversation are shifting, which provides new, and probably much-needed, opportunities for instilling a – much-needed – “counter-culture”.

All the best and a happy new year,

Jakob