Principles and Pluralist Approaches in Teaching Economics

Towards a Transformative Science

Samuel Decker, Wolfram Elsner, Svenja Flechtner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367785604
• eBook ISBN: 9781351711272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This volume is a state-of-the-art compilation of diverse and innovative perspectives, principles, and a number of practiced approaches of fields, courses, and methods of pluralist economics teaching. It fosters constructive controversy aiming to incite authors and commentators to engage in fruitful debate.

The complex economic problems of the 21st century require a pluralist, real-world oriented, and innovative discipline of economics, capable of addressing and teaching those complex issues to students from diverse perspectives. This volume addresses a number of key questions: Which models could be taught outside the equilibrium and optimality paradigm? Which methods could help to improve our understanding of the complex globalized economy? How can qualitative and quantitative methods be combined in a fruitful way to analyze complex economic problems? How can the academic isolation of mainstream economics that has developed over many decades be overcome, despite its attempted transdisciplinary imperialism? What role should knowledge from other disciplines play in teaching economics, and what is the relevance of transdisciplinarity? Through examining these issues, the editors and authors have created a pluralist but cohesive book on teaching economics in the contemporary classroom, drawing from ideas and examples from around the world.

Principles and Pluralist Approaches in Teaching Economics is a unique collection of diverse perspectives on the methodology and applications of pluralist economics teaching. It will be a great resource for those teaching economics at various levels as well as researchers and intermediate and advanced students searching for pluralism in economics.

Part I
Principles for teaching pluralist economics

1
The second opinion

An ethical approach to learning and teaching economics

Alan Freeman

1 Introduction: economics, pluralism, and the right to a second opinion

The chapter suggests that the best way to introduce students to the pluralist method in economics, and thereby heterodox alternatives to the mainstream, is to focus on the ethical responsibilities of the professional economist. Teaching and learning can then be organised around the principle that the economist, analogously with the health practitioner, has a duty to reduce the risk of harm.

As first suggested in Freeman (2015), the primary way in which economists do harm is by unjustifiably claiming that their analyses or recommendations are true when these have not been validated by testing them against alternative explanations of reality. This practice occurs because economics, unlike any other branch of the sciences, adheres to the monotheoretic fallacy (Freeman 2015) that we can develop an adequate understanding of an object of study by pursuing a single theoretical approach, based on a single set of presuppositions, without considering other approaches.

This denies the public the ‘right to a second opinion’, accepted in health care and other human sciences. This is the right to be informed of all those possible analyses which would lead to alternative courses of action to that recommended by the expert, allowing it the autonomy to make its own informed decisions based on the combination of the advice given, its own experience, and its own requirements.

Monotheoreticism demonstrably leads to false analyses, confirmed by the experience of structural readjustment, shock therapy, the financial crash of 2008, and other areas (DeMartino 2011; Earle et al. 2017; Freeman 2009). This leads to harm because the public either adopts, or consents to, policies that make things worse than they could have been, had alternatives known at the time been adopted in their place. Economists bear responsibility for this harm if they have made unjustified claims of truth, misleading the public into placing trust in their analyses and the courses of action that flow from them.

The primary duty of the economist is to avoid doing harm in this way. To fulfil this duty, the would-be economist must be aware of and capable of deducing, presenting, and clarifying the range of alternative explanations of reality that are relevant in deciding on the courses of action at issue. This practice, called pluralism, is already known to be a scientific requirement in economics (Freeman 2015) because, unless alternative relevant explanations of observed reality have been considered, we cannot justifiably claim that one single explanation has been validated. We can now further clarify that pluralism is not only valid on the grounds of methodology and epistemology, as recognised in the literature and elucidated in many contributions to this volume, but also constitutes an ethical duty of any practicing economist – including its teachers and researchers – precisely because it is unethical to inspire trust in a statement that scientifically does not merit it when that trust leads to harm.

No claim is involved that the alternatives are automatically right, or that the public will necessarily make the correct decision, any more than a doctor asserts that patients are better able to cure their conditions than health practitioners. The point is simply that the risk of ‘econogenic’ harm – harm caused by economists – is greater if the public, or the client, is not informed of the alternatives, just as the risk of iatrogenic harm – harm caused by doctors – is greater if the patient is not informed of the alternatives.¹

Just as a professional doctor will say, ‘I diagnose cancer for which the currently recommended treatment is a combination of surgery and chemotherapy, but there are known risks associated with this; you should consider the following possible alternative treatments’, the economist should be able, and required, to say things such as ‘I diagnose excessive government spending for which the currently recommended prescription is a combination of austerity, cuts in government spending, deregulation, and privatisation. However, you should consider the alternative diagnosis that the economic problems stem from insufficient government income caused by idle economic capacity, and various alternative prescriptions that this view leads to, such as monetary and fiscal stimuli financed by appropriate taxes and responsible borrowing’.

This principle also governs the equivalent heterodox statement, which might run something like, ‘I diagnose inadequate levels of economic activity for which there are a number of prescriptions including monetary stimulus, fiscal demand stimuli, and direct government investment in new capacity, all of which should be considered. However, there are a number of alternative theories, for example that the underlying problem is the lack of controls on government spending. Prescriptions would then range from reigning in the excess to outsourcing inefficient government functions to the private sector’.

The idea that the responsibility of the economist is to propose a range of possible alternatives, along with the reasons for preferring one over the other, is hence, as increasingly recognised, a systemic and comprehensive antidote to the reigning logical positivist idea that the economists’ responsibility is to be ‘technically competent’ in prescribing a single package of policy options derived from the single theoretical framework of prevailing orthodoxy.

This chapter makes a further proposal: that pluralism, thus defined, is not merely superior as a practice but as pedagogy – a means of enabling the student to learn. That is to say, it is a better way to learn and (therefore) a better way to teach.

2 Pluralism as pedagogical best practice

Because pluralism is thus a general principle applying to all of economics, not just an antidote to orthodoxy, we can evolve and assess general pedagogic methods in economics based on it. The novelty of this chapter’s approach, as noted above, is that it treats monotheoreticism as an ethical in addition to a scientific failure; pluralism thus constitutes an ethical duty.

This approach provides a pedagogical reason for pluralism, a rather critical point. Much pluralist writing on education starts from epistemological or methodological bases for pluralism and then addresses the problems arising from the entrenched resistance of course designers from within the subject. The pluralist pedagogue, in any subject, is often up against the unwritten convention that the subject specialists ‘know’ what is to be taught, so that the only problem is how to teach it. Why ‘waste time’ familiarising students with what is ‘known’ to be untrue? The informed pedagogical answer is, of course, that even if we are 100% certain of our present knowledge, it is only by encountering ideas that contradict said knowledge that the student can learn. A yet more precise answer is that in any case, the student is tasked not merely with acquiring some fixed thing called ‘knowledge’ but with learning how to generate new knowledge, which requires her to be capable of interrogating ideas critically and experimenting with alternatives.

Economics presents a further damaging twist to this uninformed prejudice. Uniquely, the subject specialists define ‘knowledge’ of the subject as mastery of a single legitimate methodological approach. The case for reform thereby appears internal to the subject, leading to a permanent uphill battle. As Dow (2009, 53) puts it:

When the impression has been created that there is only one legitimate approach to economics (within which there may be differences of theory and method, but not methodology), it is hard to get across a methodologically-pluralist approach.

Ethical responsibility is a different starting point: it is a generic curricular requirement. It follows from the fact that the student, when she becomes a practitioner, will have influence in society, which she should know how to exercise responsibly. The conduct of experts is as important as the expertise itself – otherwise the infamous Josef Mengele, who justified lethal experiments in the death camps on the grounds that the knowledge gained would contribute to medical science, should be celebrated as a pioneering investigator. Ethics is, for precisely this reason, increasingly recognised as a generic requirement of learning at the higher education level, indeed especially – and interestingly – in technological subjects (Fry et al. 2009, 295–296). A growing number of universities publicly and explicitly state (see e.g. Sheffield 2011) that any and every student that graduates from the university will be ethically aware and competent.

This point is poorly understood and therefore worth establishing at greater length. In 2007 the Association for Heterodox Economics (Freeman 2007), in response to an exercise by the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), compared benchmarked curricula in a range of subjects and found that economics was alone in omitting any requirement for diversity. The point is stark when these benchmarks are studied. The following extracts are taken from the responses of the other subjects.

Theology

Given that constant new development has been the characteristic of the field of TRS [Theology and Religions Studies] since the latter half of the twentieth century, both in the UK and elsewhere, it is vital that any definition of the subject does not constrain future innovation … Much of the excitement of the discipline lies in its contested nature.

Accountancy

[K]nowledge and understanding of some of the alternative technical languages and practices of accounting (for example, alternative recognition rules and valuation bases, accounting rules followed in other socio-economic domains, alternative managerial accounting approaches to control and decision-making) … the ability to critically evaluate such theories and evidence.

Earth sciences

It is stressed that the examples which follow should not be taken as prescriptive but are presented to illustrate the variation in emphasis from subject areas which can be described as natural sciences-based to those characterised as more social sciences or humanities-based.

History

We have seen our task as the following: to lay out criteria for judging the suitability and adequacy of single-honours degree courses in history; to do this in a way that is as specific as possible without undermining the principle that there are many different suitable and adequate ways of constructing and making available the great richness and diversity of history; to do it in a way that recognises also the need for adaptability to new academic developments in the field, and innovations in course structures and teaching methods.

Geography

The breadth of geography means that many of its core constituents can be approached through a number of routes, and so any attempts at prescription must be discarded; institutions offering degree programmes in geography must be free to decide upon the details of content and organisation. A valued characteristic of the discipline is its plurality of ways of knowing and understanding the world, and the depth to which individual specialisms are studied will vary according to the nature of specific departments.

The AHE’s report (Freeman 2007, 8) concluded that

Faced with a benchmark less critical of its prescriptions than theology and which attaches less importance to diversity than accountancy, it is hard to accept that iterati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• List of reviewers
• Towards a pluralist economic education for a transformative science – introduction
• PART I Principles for teaching pluralist economics
• PART II Approaches and building blocks
• PART III Teaching for socio-ecological transformation: economics as a transformative science?
• Appendix: documentation: practicing pluralism through study program accreditation
• Index