Institutions and ‘Science’: The Contest about Pluralism in Economics in France

ABSTRACT

For a long time, France was a country in which various approaches to economics coexisted. This pluralism began to dwindle in the mid-1990s. Since then, France has witnessed the increasing and now overwhelming domination of mainstream economics. This article, drawing on a study of the evolution of the recruitment of professors of economics in France, documents the situation and links the observed trends to the changing institutions governing the discipline (a centralized system evolving under the influence of international norms and instruments). It is demonstrated that far from being fair and neutral devices, the rules and instruments governing economics—notably the ranking lists of economic journals—incorporate specific worldviews strongly biasing the assessment of research toward the mainstream. This article documents the tentative use of ‘voice and exit’ by the French Association of Political Economy to reform the economics discipline. Furthermore, it discusses the arguments proclaimed by Jean Tirole to prevent the French Ministry of Higher Education from creating a new university section called ‘Economy and Society’ to reinstate pluralism: they fall back on a monistic view of science that is questioned notably by developments—both factual and conceptual—in science studies and epistemology.     

What Happened to Kapp’s Theory of Social Costs? A Case of Metatheoretical Dispute and Dissent in Economics

In the early 1970s Wilfred Beckerman and K. William Kapp engaged in a serious dispute. Although it focused on social costs, the dispute raised issues about the very foundations of economics. The differences in approach to social costs that this dispute exposed were so deep-rooted as to preclude (or at least hinder) any possibility of constructive dialogue. This article argues that the subsequent ‘conspiracy of silence’ against Kapp should be understood in terms of Kapp’s very different conception of economics as a social science. This issue is relevant to a broader discussion about the boundaries of pluralism in economics—how these boundaries are drawn and the conditions for a constructive dialogue among economists and with other social scientists.     

The Wrong Type of Pluralism: Toward a Transdisciplinary Social Science

When heterodox economists talk of pluralism they are generally talking about pluralism within the economics profession—they are asking: how can we have a more pluralistic economics profession? This paper argues that another, perhaps more useful, way to think of pluralism and economics is from the perspective of all the social sciences. When considered in reference to the social science profession rather than in reference to the economics profession, the amount of pluralism increases significantly, since different social sciences follow quite different methodologies. But looking at pluralism from the social science perspective reveals a different type of pluralism problem in social science. While there may be plenty of pluralism within social science as a whole, there is a serious question about whether it is appropriately distributed. This paper argues that heterodox economists' agenda should be a greater blending of all the social science departments. It summarizes proposals to do so on both the undergraduate level and graduate level, and explains why supporting variations of these proposals would be a strategy that would further the objectives of most heterodox economists more than would their current strategy of pushing for more pluralism in economics.     

Pluralism and Anti-pluralism in Economics: The Atomistic Individual and Religious Fundamentalism

This short paper examines a possible connection between religion and economics in terms of the parallelism between the atomistic individual doctrine and the individual soul doctrine. The paper explores whether resistance to pluralism in economics as a methodological practice might be illuminated in terms of this connection. On this view, resistance to pluralism in economics is not a matter of economists holding methodological views about economics practice that are contrary to pluralism, but is rather a kind of anti-pluralism reflecting an intransigent defense of the atomistic individual view as a kind of core or ‘untouchable’ deep doctrine. Two arguments are advanced to demonstrate the parallelism between the atomistic individual doctrine and the individual soul doctrine.     

Religion,economics and politics: The Bishops and Keynes in the post-Keynesian ERA

This paper makes a proposal for reintroducing sociological or social economics into contemporary economic science. Such a reintroduction is proposed to be substantive, by analyzing the social structuring of the economy, and formal, by including sociological/social economics in the current (JEL) classification system of economic disciplines (code A.15). Both epistemological and ontological arguments can be presented to support the proposal. Epistemological arguments invoke the presence of essential components of sociological economics in the development of economic thought, and ontological arguments stress the role of social factors in economic life. In this paper I present primarily epistemological (theoretical-methodological) arguments for sociological economics, and secondarily ontological ones. I show that the present designation, sociology of economics, is something different from sociological or social economics in that the former refers to economic epistemology (knowledge) and the latter to economic ontology (reality). I conclude that, in addition to a sociology of economic science, we need a sociology of economic life.     

中国经济学界需要什么样的多元论

经济学多元论具有多层次的含义,绝不能把它简单地看成是方法的多元论。今天,多元论问题已经构成经济学改革国际运动中极为重要的内容,日益引起学者们的高度关注。应该站在对西方主流经济学的反思高度,站在对中国经济学未来发展趋势的前瞻高度,从广义方法论上讨论多元论问题。中国经济学界所需要的是广义方法论上的多元论,这对我们在马克思主义的指导下推动中国经济学的繁荣具有重要的理论意义。     

Revolution,Reform, and Social Justice

The literature on mainstream economics usually takes the United States as the main geographical reference. However, the various criteria that define mainstream economics can be applied outside the United States. The ideas that have prestige and influence in a given country’s academia may not be the same ideas that constitute American mainstream economics. Brazil has been an example of pluralism. An institutional perspective helps explain why several people in Brazil conform with institutional rules of thought and of behavior that differ from those of the American mainstream, including the norm of pluralism, and how these rules influence many people.     

实证经济学与规范经济学: 科学标准的辨析

经济学研究中的实证方法和规范方法的运用历来都存在争议.文章在对实证经济学和规范经济学区分的缘起、内容和产生后果的分析基础上,对经济学的"科学性"标准进行了较详细的分析,对经济学研究中忽视甚至无视价值判断等一系列规范性问题带来的严重后果进行了阐述.文章认为,经济学作为社会科学,规范方法的运用是不可避免的,这是由经济学本身的学科属性决定的.实证主义经济学和规范主义经济学之间并没有不可逾越的鸿沟.     

The turn in recent economics and return of orthodoxy

This paper examines change on the economics research frontier,and asks whether the current competition between new researchprogrammes may be supplanted by a new single dominant approachin the future. The paper discusses whether economics tends tobe dominated by a single approach or reflect a pluralism ofapproaches, and argues that, historically, it has alternatedbetween the two. It argues that orthodoxy usually emerges fromheterodoxy, and interprets the division between orthodoxy andheterodoxy in terms of a core–periphery distinction. Regardingrecent economics, the paper maps out two different types ofcombinations of new research programmes as being synchronicor diachronic in nature. It treats the new research programmesas a new kind of heterodoxy, and asks how a new orthodoxy mightarise out of this new heterodoxy and traditional heterodoxy.It discusses this question by advancing two views regardinghow to different types of combinations in the new research programmesmight consolidate along the lines of three shared commitmentswith traditional heterodoxy to form a new orthodoxy in economics.     

Equal Pay for Comparable Worth: A Policy for Eliminating the Undervaluation of Women’s Work

This article reviews and assesses Elinor Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and Paul A. Sabatier's Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to determine their usefulness to institutional economics with regard to the theory of normative criteria and policymaking. The conclusions are that (1) Ostrom's IAD is not of assistance to institutional economics, (2) Sabatier's ACF and institutional economics have four important ideas in common, (3) the different levels of normative beliefs found from ACF studies have not been integrated into institutional economics, and (4) the technological and ecological criteria found in institutional economics have not been integrated into ACF.     

Towards an Austro–German theory of uneven economic development? A plea for theorising by inclusion

Based on Meir Kohn’s distinction between research programmes based on ‘value’ and ‘exchange’ (2004), this paper argues for a ‘production’ paradigm based on the tradition of Menger and Schumpeter. It is suggested that this production-based programme could use, as its starting point, Schumpeter’s (Wesen und Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie, 1908) attempt to mediate in the Methodenstreit by arguing that different types of economic problems require theories at different levels of abstraction. This opens up for ‘theorising by inclusion’, an approach combining key elements both of traditional German economics and of Austrian economics in the Mengerian tradition.     

Comments on “The Corporate State,Economic Performance,and Social Policy”

This paper provides an introduction to the Minsky-Veblen Cycles as a specific example of pluralist economic thinking in the context of the recent global economic crisis. It illustrates how pluralism can be applied to economic research. Specifically, the Minsky-Veblen Cycles combine three elements of institutional and post-Keynesian thought to explain key features of the current crisis. These elements are (1) John Maynard Keynes's postulate of effective demand, (2) Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis, and (3) Thorstein Veblen's concept of conspicuous consumption. In this paper, we have a two-fold approach to them: First, we systematize the connection between the Minsky-Veblen Cycles as a theoretical argument and the epistemological rationale of a pluralist approach to economics. Second, we contrast the implications of our approach for incorporating behavioral assumptions in macroeconomic arguments to mainstream claims for a "microfoundation" of macroeconomic theory.     

法经济学及其在中国的应用

“法经济学”迄今并没有一个大家一致认可的、标准的定义。法经济学可从狭义和广义两个角度进行区分。广义地理解法经济学可以使我们的视野变得更为开阔，同时也拓展了法律与经济这个主题所涵盖的范围。法经济学在20世纪七八十年代得到了蓬勃发展，但进入90年代后则鲜有突破，所以，法经济学未来的发展方向已经成为当前法经济学面临的最主要的理论问题。最近几年来，越来越多的中国学者加入到法经济学的研究中来。法经济学在中国的兴起，与中国正在经历一个制度变迁的时代有关。     

The last generalists

Abstract

The general trend of research specialisation in economics has contributed to the marginalisation of the history of economic thought. However, it has also led to a state of fragmentation in the profession and thereby increased the costs of neglecting the history of economic thought. This paper argues that historians of thought can help to counteract fragmentation because they are special generalists that fulfil multiple functions, for example, in the education of economists, the detection of blind spots in modern theories and the identification of routes for innovation by backtracking.     

Ranking economics departments in the US South: an update

This study provides an update to Mixon and Upadhyaya’s (2001) ranking of Southern economics departments using research output indexed in EconLit. Ranking results from a ‘core’ (i.e. the top five faculty researchers) of each institution’s economics department reveal that Vanderbilt University, George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and Georgia State University currently maintain the top five economics departments, respectively, in the US South. Relatedly, the five institutions rising the most from Mixon and Upadhyaya (2001) are Tulane University, Georgia State University, University of Texas–Dallas, Rice University and Florida International University, respectively.     

Sociology of economics or sociology of economy? theoretical-methodological arguments for sociological economics

This paper makes a proposal for reintroducing sociological or social economics into contemporary economic science. Such a reintroduction is proposed to be substantive, by analyzing the social structuring of the economy, and formal, by including sociological/social economics in the current (JEL) classification system of economic disciplines (code A.15). Both epistemological and ontological arguments can be presented to support the proposal. Epistemological arguments invoke the presence of essential components of sociological economics in the development of economic thought, and ontological arguments stress the role of social factors in economic life. In this paper I present primarily epistemological (theoretical-methodological) arguments for sociological economics, and secondarily ontological ones. I show that the present designation, sociology of economics, is something different from sociological or social economics in that the former refers to economic epistemology (knowledge) and the latter to economic ontology (reality). I conclude that, in addition to a sociology of economic science, we need a sociology of economic life. There is nothing surprising in the habit of economists to invade the sociological field. A major part of their work—practically the whole of what they have to say on institutions and on the…[social] forces which shape economic behavior—inevitably overlaps the sociologist’s preserves. In consequence, a no man’s land or everyman’s land has developed that might conveniently be called economic sociology … [or sociological economics] (Schumpeter 1956:134). The author is grateful to two anonymous referees for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this article.