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Last week I (Jo) enjoyed a four-day trip to Reno where the Association for Institutional Thought Annual Conference took place. As always, many heterodox economists and students showed up with interesting papers. For me, one of the most interesting papers was Fred Lee's "Heterodox Economics and Its Critics." His paper is a response to those critics who deny the distinctive identity of heterodox economics (readers may refer to Fred Lee's editorial in the 91st issue of the Newsletter). Are we, heterodox economists, different from orthodox economists? In what sense and to what extent is heterodox economics distinctive from orthodox economics? Luca De Benedicts and Michele Di Maio give you some answers to these questions in their paper, "Within and Between Disagreement Across Schools of Thought in Economics: Evidence from Italian Economists.'' Some of the empirical results you may find surprising. As bad critics always exist, so do bad administrators; they are not tolerant of views that might challenge their vested interests. See the story of Clive Spash who, while employed by a government research institute in Australia, wrote an article critical of market-based pollution trade credit programs. The story has a familiar ring to it: administrators try to prevent its publication; after some bad publicity, they allow it to be published, but only after substantive editing. For the somewhat happy ending in this case, the author eventually resigns and publishes the article in its original form. Finally, check out the Guardian editorial by Larry Elliott "Rescuing Economics from its Own Crisis", writing about a conference at King's College Cambridge on the future of economics, he states:
"Even more worryingly, there has been no room in this view of the world for the heterodox. The prestigious economics journals have been cleansed of all but the purveyors of highly technical algebra. Economic history has been removed from the syllabus, because those who yearn for economics to be a hard science believe the past can teach them nothing. Truly, the lunatics have taken over the asylum." |