This issue of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter comes straight from the annual conference of the European Association

This issue of the Heterodox Economics Newsletter comes straight from the annual conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE), which took place in Nice/France this year. As a more or less regular visitor of this conference I have to admit that I am slightly impressed - not only with respect to the large number of participants (roughly 400 researchers took part this year), which has been successively growing over the past years, but also with regard to the diversity and quality of presented papers. The conference witnessed inspiring keynotes on the complex relations between technological change, productivity growth, unemployment and inequality (by Maria Savona and Giovanni Dosi) and a series of highly interesting panels, sessions and individual contributions, e.g. on the future of the Eurozone (see e.g. here or here), the inherent fragility of strongly interlinked financial systems (by this inspiring colleague), pluralist approaches to economic teaching and research (partially based on thesetwo excellent books) or the fundamental challenges arising from climate change and other ecological calamities (e.g. here). In sum, the most inspiring aspect to me was the great diversity of methodological approaches. As EAEPE is an association based on a pluralist tradition, theoretical diversity has always played a strong role at these conferences. However, this year’s conference also witnessed an increase in methodological diversity as the usual exercises in model-building (mainly: ABMs, SFC-models, dynamic systems, network models), econometrics and the history of thought where complemented by highly interesting in-depth case-studies drawing on qualitative methodologies and archival research. In my opinion, the conference benefitted greatly from this diversity of approaches as the results and insights gained from applying different methods to similar problems are often complementary and, hence, allow for a deeper understanding of the subjects under consideration. Finally, I wanted to use this opportunity to congratulate my good friend and colleague at the Johannes Kepler University Linz Claudius Gräbner, who, in joint work with Birte Strunk, has received EAEPE’s Herbert Simon Prize for the best paper authored by young scholars. Their paper is located at the heart of the debate on pluralism in economics; it takes up and responds to criticisms by mainstream economists, showing how these criticisms of a pluralist approach are often based on misunderstandings or unquestioned preconceptions on the side of more ‘conventional’ authors. In case you are interested in their work, you can easily access this ‘award-winning’ contribution here. All the best & keep up the good work, Jakob © public domain