Engaging with the Mainstream, but not Engaged to it: A Response to Dan MacDonald.

This post is a response to a recent post on the blog Imagining History by Dan MacDonald.

I need to start by mentioning the title. Engaged AGAINST the Mainstream would be far more impressive. "Engaging with the mainstream" only really refers to those that have it wrong (implicit in Dan's post from my reading). That is, those people who use mainstream methods to ask leftist questions. Those who build alternative frameworks to attack the mainstream are engaged against the mainstream in my opinion. These posts are concerned with both types of people.

Moving on:
I cannot dispute Dan's conclusion that of those around us in the UMass Amherst Economics department, as a general rule the younger the person the more they seem to engage in what I consider to be mainstream methodology AND IDEOLOGY. Certainly mainstream methods have not become more "correct" in the last 40 years, is it fair to imply as Dan does that these methods and ideas have become more hegemonic (even in our department)? Certainly it is well documented that social sciences have become more empirical in methodology over this period. The question then becomes; does the perception of younger heterodox economists engaging with more mainstream methods really hold water, or are they just becoming more cough* "analytically rigorous" than their predecessors?

What is more interesting to me is what actually makes an economist heterodox?
I don't view people using mainstream methodology to answer "leftist" questions as radical economists, just liberal mainstream people and our department is full of them.

Why then do I give primacy to methodology? I view people using non-traditional methods because of a philosophical problem with empirical analysis as far more radical (heterodox) than those using hegemonic methodology to ask socially progressive questions. My reasons for this are too complex to address here and will be addressed further at a later date.

MacDonald's conclusion suggests that thinks along a similar line. The suggestion that people who are not engaged to the mainstream will receive better jobs (historically) than self styled heterodox people who use mainstream methods certainly is true in the history of our department. Does this hold in a wider sample? I think those who are engaged with the mainstream as opposed to against it never were and never will be heterodox and thus we have no evidence of them in heterodox positions.

As soon as they do get a job, these "heterodox economists" will apply their mainstream models to questions that are not the socially progressive ones they pretended to care about in grad school, but rather the traditional questions that are published in mainstream economics journals, that will result in tenure and a meaningless existence as another second rate economist. (Prove me wrong people.)

Should we engage with the mainstream? No. Should we use mainstream methods to engage against the mainstream? Historically people seem to fail at this and end up just as fringe members of said mainstream when they try. Should we bother with the mainstream at all? No? Should we spend our time making what is now radical more widely accepted? I would say yes, it is all we can do.

Thanks Dan, great post.

Random Plug

Next post will have to be about rum I suppose.
I generally hate the "human interest" side of sports but, Tigers fan, Yankee fan, or general baseball fan, Curtis Granderson happens to be the rare combination of professional athlete and decent writer (at least entertaining). Check it out if you have some time.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew?author=Curtis+Granderson

The Political Action of Teaching

As always when starting a semester of teaching "introduction to macroeconomics" I am wondering how much Marx I should include, how critical I should be of the material in the text book that I am using, and how much emphasis to place on the idea that what I am presenting are theories and not "facts".

From the epistemological view that I favor all theories contain their own set of facts and there is no external truth.
The reality of course is that I will not get into this level of subtlety in an introduction to economics course.

The question then is should I be honest in that what I present are only possible theories (which runs the risk of confusing students who are seeing their first ever economics material)? or pertaining to my last post is it the "right" thing to do to present the conclusions of theories that I favor as "economics".

The latter is what the hegemonic neoclassical school has been doing for generations in economics education in this country, but is resorting to their tactics a useful way to combat their ideology?

I have not decided how overtly political my teaching process will be this semester, but anyone who claims they can teach a-politically is either self deluded or a liar.
The very action of presenting some material and skimming over other is a political process and the question that seems important to me is to what level do we owe it to our intro students to make them aware of this process? And how much more success will I have in teaching for example that all profit comes from exploitation rather than the MPK if I present it as fact rather than a competing theory?

Engaging Conservative Economics

The inspiration for this post came from a recent exchange on the list serve of graduate students in the economics department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (many of whom also blog, a list of these blogs can be found HERE).

I will not summarize the email thread for reasons that should become clear in the following post.

I feel that far to much effort on the part of so called "heterodox economists" is spent criticizing what is often referred to as "mainstream" or "neoclassical" economics.

I do not dispute that critical analysis of the mainstream is an important part of our task as radical economists. The very nature of the terms mainstream and radical (or heterodox) imply that their theories are more commonly accepted than ours, and thus are more widely taught, and unfortunately accepted.

The flip side of this which is commonly ignored by many of my colleagues is that the very process of criticism legitimizes neoclassical economic theories as being worth our time. The process of criticism relies on the implicit assumption that these theories are worth the time to think about.

A person presenting a theory that human civilization started on jupiter and migrated to earth when jupiter was full would find their basic intelligence criticized, not aspects within the theory that they are presenting (such as how people traveled through the solar system). This big picture approach needs to find a larger role withing radical economics. By accepting assumptions of the mainstream economic theories we are wasting valuable resources (time) that could (and I argue should) be spent further developing weak points in our own theories of the workings of the economy instead of implicitly validating equilibrium based nonsense.