Pluralism in Economics: Why is it Important
One of my lecturers always said something when teaching a class to keep our spirits up in
learning economics: “Economics is the only Nobel Prize awardee that comes from the social
sciences, the other awardee subjects are from the natural sciences, so be proud of your major!”
Those words are true in a sense, economics is indeed a unique study subject. Even though
it has many definitions, the core of economics is ultimately simple. Economics basically learns
how humans interact with their livelihood needs: foodstuffs, clothing, things to indulge on, etc.
When a prehistoric tribe found new territory that has more berries but has to fight another tribe
for it, it’s already a question of opportunity cost, a basic concept very prevalent in economics.
As the human life becomes more complex time to time with the building of societies and then
nations, the way humans manage their resources also needs to change. Enter, economics as a
field of study.
We all know what Adam Smith did to economics in 1776. He’s revered as someone who
codified the processes humans do in trade and analyzed how can this trade be more beneficial
for all parties involved in the long run. Adam Smith could be said as someone who kickstarted
economics (although it’s still debatable if Ibn Khaldun was actually the one), and from him,
other thinkers started to blossom and wrote analyses that add to or critiqued his thought. The
golden age of economics started here, until the birth of Neoclassical Economics in the 1970s.
Usually, economic thinkers also dictated how nation states managed their economies. Think
for example, how classical economists guided the industrial revolution, or the influence
Keynesianism had after the great depression.
Surely, since economics has a great influence on the human welfare, this study has a noble
cause, revered by the masses, and there are a lot of interests to learn it just like other fields of
studies. But the reality is that economics, and ultimately the economics major, the main place
where economics is taught, has a lot of internal problems that made it look arduous, or even a
public enemy in the US.1
As an economics major student, what expectations we usually have before we enter a class
for the first time? Probably something more akin to a lot of qualitative analysis, learn about a
lot of economic theories and applying it in critical and exciting discussions. At least that was
what I thought, since economics is a social science and I like learning about politics and the
like. But instead, we need to learn from big books with a lot of theory, from the basics like
comparative advantage until the likes of game theory, with very little reflections towards the
reality. This approach makes economic students harder in understanding the links between
economic theory and the real world, which is really the only reason we want to learn economics,
isn’t it? I’m not the only one speaking this, there’s already a lot of critiques in this manner.
Critics usually call this approach the mainstream or the orthodox method, and is connected
to discussions about education in general, although when relating to higher education, usually
economics is the most problematic one. Wilson and Dixon (2009) thinks this approach is
“monist” (i.e., only allows one way of thinking)2, and made economics seemed to be a hard
subject even though in actuality it was the teaching method that artificially made it difficult. 3
A collection of students from France who rallied under the name Pour un enseignement
pluraliste dans le supérieur en économie (PEPS-E) put out a manifesto against mainstream
economics, saying that it makes the students ignorant about real economic phenomenon since
it is considered too complex to teach in an early level.4 The latter argument actually reflects
how economics is seen by the public.
The real economy, by the general public, is perceived (in fact, it is) as something that’s
under the control of economics (the study), and in extension, academic economists.56 It’s a fair
assessment, since governments usually pick economic professors as governmental advisors so
it’s no long shot. Looking at how the economy performed in the 21st century, it’s easy to see
why the people dislike economists. The financial crisis of 2008, the gradual disappearance of
the middle class, rising inequality really deepened the negative view of economics. All of those
woes are further explained by James Kwak in his concept of “Economism”, where the dogmatic
view towards economics recreate those problems.7 Academic economics also don’t help much
in that regard.8 Both internal and external problems of economics necessitate radical changes
that, if academic professors can’t do, then we as economics students must start.
Mainstream economics is often contrasted with pluralist economics, a rallying cry for
students or academics alike that challenge the status quo. By definition, intellectual pluralism
simply advocates for a more diverse teaching of a subject (heterodox, one might also say). In
economics, this would translate to the acknowledging of other schools of economic thought,
even those that might be considered as fringe, into the curriculum. For your information, the
prevalent school nowadays is neoclassical economics, as many writers have expressed.91011
That doesn’t mean, though, that pluralist economics advocate to get rid of the neoclassical
school. A pluralist method teaches mainstream economic theories but also introduces
dissenting ideas. For neoclassical economics, there are already a lot of schools who disagree
with it but are not given the spotlight yet, like Marxist economics, or even environmental
economics for the newer ideas.
If students are taught different paradigms of economic theory that contrast each other, they
would be able to develop a deeper and a more critical understanding about economics and,
above all, the economy. That’s the basic idea. The way mainstream economics is taught doesn’t
provide students with variative arguments, and with that as their only understanding of
economics it’s very limiting if they want to know more. Sometimes, a subject of study also
can’t follow the prevailing theory that runs mainstream economics. To give an example, health
economics can’t always be analyzed in a neoclassical market paradigm, since health is a
universal need and therefore should not be at the mercy of market forces.
The inclusion of interdisciplinary subjects is also an important aspect of pluralist economics.
We already know that the economy is not something observable as a singular entity.12 It is
inevitable that we need to learn about how humans interact with their environment because
they are the subject of economics. This puts sociology and psychology important in
understanding economics. Political decisions also affect the economy heavily, so does culture,
international relations, you get the idea. Luckily, we already have these interdisciplinary
measures in the mainstream curriculum, like behavioral economics or institutional economics.
But there are still disciplines such as gender studies, which if combined with economics can
create feminist economics, that still lack attention. Structural and administrative problems that
prevent institutions to develop more pluralist disciplines also exist, like the complexity of
combining two disciplines into one so that students would get the best of both worlds, or even
different cultures among institutions that hinders further discussion.131415
Some thinkers also advocate the inclusion of Problem Based Thinking (PBT) in the pluralist
method.16 Since the current method handles the real world as something only exemplary, as
probable, experimental outcomes when you tinker with theory calculation, we as economic
students by result will have a narrower understanding about how the real world actually relates
to economic theory, confined to the basics such as supply and demand or marginal utility.17
Truth is, the world is really complex and can’t be linked with only one reasoning. They’re not
the outcomes of theory, but live human interactions who couldn’t care less about what
professors think. Besides, isn’t theory something that progressively changes time to time?
Theory comes from observation, and academics reduce those observed occurrences to a law
that will be used to repeat the good outcomes or repel the bad ones by policymakers. It is better
for students to learn about how real-world situations relate to theories from time to time, rather
than be expert at a theory without knowing the real-world implications.
To demonstrate how the struggle of pluralist economics has been fought on for so long, we
need to go back to the 1960s in the University of Sydney, where a heated academic debate
existed. Frank Stillwell, an economics professor, who was still a professor assistant back then,
came to the university as new hire for two new professors, arriving from Manchester, who were
appointed to the position in the established chairs of the Department of Economics. These
professors had an orthodox view of economics and wanted to change the before more
empirically oriented, institutional, and analytical curriculum to a new one more in line with
neoclassical economics. When the changes happened, a lot of the students disagree, even the
teaching staff, including Frank. So, they rallied for the establishment of a political economy
discipline in the department, which took a decade until it got noticed by the Faculty Dean in
1973. Finally, the discipline of political economy can be studied alongside with the neoclassical
economics.18 Their struggle didn’t end there though; there was a lot of political consequences
for the “political economy group”. But alas, the situation now is a lot better, ultimately in all
of Australia, in spite of the neoclassical dominance still existing to this day.19
Senior economists and university professors became more and more cognizant about the
movement, and some decided to push for it. In 1992, a group of economists wrote a “Plea for
a Pluralistic and Rigorous Economics” in an advertisement for the American Economics
Review.20 It was even signed by Nobel laureates such as Jan Tinbergen and Paul Samuelson.21
They targeted the ‘monopoly of methods’ and ‘core assumptions’ that we encounter in
economics reference books such as Mankiw’s or Blanchard’s. 22 Then, in 1993, the
International Confederations for Pluralism in Economics (ICAPE) was founded as a
consortium of over 30 groups, which could be seen as the manifestation of the plea from the
year before. The Transatlantic Dialogue held in 2003 by European, American, and Canadian
University Associations tried to define what intellectual pluralism in light of the broader
pluralist movement.23 Those actions from the higher-ups means that pluralism began to be
accepted in intellectual circles, but that doesn’t stop students to do their own line of action.
Now, the Australian effort didn’t get international attention yet. Bombastic revolutionary
actions always come from the French, and in the economic sphere they’ve got a record on that
too. In 2000, a group of French students popularly known as Autisme-économie, published an
Open Letter for Economic Students, which focused more on critiquing neoclassical dominance
in academic economics.24 The movement then caught on to French professors who supported
the movement, 25 and got internationalized when Edward Fullbrook, an independent British
researcher opened a site dedicated to the movement named “Post-Autistic Economics”, which
remained to this day.26 A petition then was brought forth by 27 PhD students from Cambridge
in 2001 called “Opening Up Economics”, echoing the French attempts. In the same year,
economic students from 17 countries gathered in Kansas City, USA, and put out their own
Open Letter that better developed the points from their French counterparts. 27 Gaining
popularity, student movements began to pop up in subsequent years.28
All of these efforts gained mixed results at the time. The French attempt while going
international didn’t really get successful in their own country. They did got a commission going
on by the Minister of Education, but reforms were only done in putting some interdisciplinary
courses in the first semesters, but relatively economics education was still the same, different
with the political economy department the aussies achieved.29 A German study showed that the
number of heterodox professors in Germany is still very little. 30 There are already some
interdisciplinary programs that you can take, but problems still exist, particularly with how
mainstream economics is still mainstream even though the mainstream economic woes (more
present during the pandemic) are caused by the mainstream thought being reproduced again
and again.
Recently, there’s a new student movement called Rethinking Economics (RE) that has gone
worldwide. Founded by economic students from the University of Manchester in the 2010s, it
aims to, not only pluralize, but democratize and diversify the curriculum, in light of the recent
fight for equality towards people from ethnic minorities, especially People of Color (PoCs),
and also towards women, the working class, low-income persons, and others alienated by the
system. The network they built is quite immense, with 99 local groups in over 41 countries.
With these many networks, RE fits to be the new international face of student activism striving
towards pluralist economics. In reaching that goal, RE still needs to overcome challenges that
their predecessors have faced.
Reforming something that was already institutionally planted deeply is hard, every field of
study has this problem. Sometimes it’s just a case of professors hesitant to change the
curriculum, because it’s time consuming, it will also present them with administrative
difficulties like in scoring grades. Their livelihood and image are at stake, so rather than failing
in doing something new it’s best to stay with the traditional paradigm. Taking the French
experience into account, some professors even launched their own Open letter denouncing the
students’ efforts as politically motivated, and there were rumors that the students aren’t in the
position to critique something they’re still learning.31 In this case students need to provide ideas
that support structural reformations; it would be beneficial as well to have professors working
together with students since it democratizes the learning environment.
The case of mainstream economics is especially peculiar, since economics has quite the
powerful presence in every individual’s everyday lives. Politicians and policymakers want to
make sure that the economy runs smoothly, so they need academic economics to back their
decisions. The question is: For whose benefits are those policies made? As a science that
studies a social construct, it is unavoidable that economics could be subject to ideological
clashes, and those few who hold the power can basically align the economy with their own
needs or values, while alienating others. It’s the political reality. The fight for pluralist
economics should be conceived as a fight for humanity. A fair and just economy is a basic
human right, and the way to achieve it is to first reform from the roots, that is to say how
economics are taught. I believe in the power of students to change the future.
Bibliography
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Heise, A. (2016). Pluralism in economics: Inquiries into a Daedalean. ZÖSS Discussion Paper, 51, 1-32.
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