While Google's Ngram Viewer( for assessing historical text...
While Google’s Ngram Viewer for assessing historical text corpora has some deficiences, I use it occasionally to satisfy my curiosities. Recently, I looked up the term ‘heterodox economics’ to get a better impression of the long-term usage of this label (see below) and was surprised by the outcome in various ways. First, it seems that the phrase itself is rather old and has been used to describe ‘unconventional’ economic ideas even back in the 19th century. Tracking this source leads to some interesting and amusing findings. For instance, the findings for the 19th century point you to the first article ever published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics(see here), which argues that John Stuart Mill’s views on property “are generally thought to be heterodox”, which seems to me to be as accurate today as it was, seemingly, back then. Generally, you will find economists and economic ideas of all types of persuasion tagged with the ‘heterodox label’ up to the 1950s - some classical ideas, institutionalist/historical school approaches, radical economists, Georgists, Gesellians and pre- and post-Keynesians and so on.
The second interesting observation I made is, of course, a strong relative increase in mentionings since the 1990s, which not only bears witness to the fact that research in heterodox economics is improving in terms of quality and quantity, but also indicates that the meaning of the label ‘heterodox’ changed over time: what once was a mere external ascription is today more strongly associated with a genuine research program. In other words, this development indicates that those researchers, who do not want to succumb to the mainstream’s theoretical and conceptual a prioris before asking questions, are increasingly subsumed & subsume themselves under the label of ‘heterodox economics’ and make less use of other, possibly more traditional denominations relating to individual schools and traditions in economic thinking. In terms of pluralism, this development is a good thing to have as respectful mutual exchange across different analytical traditions and conceptual perspectives within a single research program is a major asset in organizing collaborative research efforts.
Having said all this, I should add that the data for this chart stops in 2008; I am sure it would be equally funny to analyze the post-crisis phase. So let’s hope that Google feeds in some more recent data in due time ;-)
All the best,
Jakob