Dear Cambridge Post-graduate Students,

I found your open letter interesting and welcome it.

There are some groups in the UK which support your cause--which I shall list
below:

1.  Tony Lawson's critical realism group/workshop at Cambridge--which I assume
you know about

2.  The Post Keynesian Economics Study Group which holds seminars about 3 times
a year and which you should attend.  For more information contact Paul Downward
at [log in to unmask] or your own John McCombie at [log in to unmask]

3.  Association for Heterodox Economics which sponsors a conference once a year
at which all heterodox economists in the UK gather to hear papers that interest
them.  Its web site is http://www.hetecon.com which has lots of information that
may interest you as well as information about its upcoming conference--such as
info on the Conference for Socialist Economists, Centre for Research in
Institutional Economics, and Postgraduate Economics Conference.  If you are
really sincere about opening up economics then you should attend this
conference.

4.  International Working Group on Value Theory--contact Alan Freeman at
[log in to unmask]

Finally, if you have not already done so you might want to read the following
articles:

Lee, F. S. and Harley, S.  1998.  "Peer Review, the Research Assessment Exercise
and the Demise of Non-Mainstream Economics."  Capital and Class 66 (Autumn):  23
- 51.

Harley, S. and Lee, F. S.  1997.  "Research Selectivity, Managerialism, and the
Academic Labor Process:  The Future of Nonmainstream Economics in U.K.
Universities."  Human Relations 50.11 (November):  1427 - 1460.

Sincerely,

Fred Lee
Department of Economics
University of Missouri-Kansas City


27 PhD-students at Cambridge University support the following
open letter:

                        Opening Up Economics:
                  A Proposal By Cambridge Students

As students at Cambridge University, we wish to encourage
a debate on contemporary economics. We set out below
what we take to be characteristic of today's economics,
what we feel needs to be debated and why:

As defined by its teaching and research practices, we
believe that economics is monopolised by a single
approach to the explanation and analysis of economic
phenomena. At the heart of this approach lies a
commitment to formal modes of reasoning that must be
employed for research to be considered valid. The evidence
for this is not hard to come by. The contents of the
discipline's major journals, of its faculties and its courses all
point in this direction.

In our opinion, the general applicability of this formal
approach to understanding economic phenomenon is
disputable. This is the debate that needs to take place.
When are these formal methods the best route to
generating good explanations? What makes these methods
useful and consequently, what are their limitations? What
other methods could be used in economics? This debate
needs to take place within economics and between
economists, rather than on the fringe of the subject or
outside of it all together.

In particular we propose the following:

1.  That the foundations of the mainstream approach be
    openly debated. This requires that the bad criticisms
    be rejected just as firmly as the bad defences.
    Students, teachers and researchers need to know
    and acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of
    the mainstream approach to economics.

2.  That competing approaches to understanding
    economic phenomena be subjected to the same
    degree of critical debate. Where these approaches
    provide significant insights into economic life, they
    should be taught and their research encouraged
    within economics. At the moment this is not
    happening. Competing approaches have little role in
    economics as it stands simply because they do not
    conform to the mainstream's view of what
    constitutes economics. It should be clear that such
    a situation is self-enforcing.

This debate is important because in our view the status quo
is harmful in at least four respects. Firstly, it is harmful to
students who are taught the "tools" of mainstream
economics without learning their domain of applicability. The
source and evolution of these ideas is ignored, as is the
existence and status of competing theories. Secondly, it
disadvantages a society that ought to be benefiting from
what economists can tell us about the world. Economics is
a social science with enormous potential for making a
difference through its impact on policy debates. In its
present form its effectiveness in this arena is limited by the
uncritical application of mainstream methods. Thirdly,
progress towards a deeper understanding of many
important aspects of economic life is being held back. By
restricting research done in economics to that based on
one approach only, the development of competing research
programs is seriously hampered or prevented altogether.
Fourth and finally, in the current situation an economist who
does not do economics in the prescribed way finds it very
difficult to get recognition for her research.

The dominance of the mainstream approach creates a
social convention in the profession that only economic
knowledge production that fits the mainstream approach
can be good research, and therefore other modes of
economic knowledge are all too easily dismissed as simply
being poor, or as not being economics. Many economists
therefore face a choice between using what they consider
inappropriate methods to answer economic questions, or to
adopt what they consider the best methods for the question
at hand knowing that their work is unlikely to receive a
hearing from economists.

Let us conclude by emphasising what we are certainly not
proposing: we are not arguing against the mainstream
approach per se, but against the fact that its dominance is
taken for granted in the profession. We are not arguing
against mainstream methods, but believe in a pluralism of
methods and approaches justified by debate. Pluralism as a
default implies that alternative economic work is not simply
tolerated, but that the material and social conditions for its
flourishing are met, to the same extent as is currently the
case for mainstream economics. This is what we mean
when we refer to an "opening up" of economics.

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