One of the main things that came out of Odile Pinney's session last week was the question of economics education and its current concentration (at least in Anglophone countries) on abstract models which are applied regardless of real world conditions.
Odile has drawn my attention to the following which take this idea forward:
1) A letter to the Economist from Professor Margaret Stevens on the current economics syllabus and its reform. An excerpt:
I do not agree that the solution to the problem of a narrow orthodoxy in the subject is to broaden the curriculum to cover a wide variety of “schools of thought” [...]. We saw the dangers of that “heterodox” approach when macroeconomics was presented to students as a choice between the beliefs of monetarists and Keynesians, a stand-off reminiscent of the Big-Endians and Little-Endians encountered by Gulliver. I want to teach my students to be economists, not adherents of one or more schools of thought.
[Full letter here.]
2) Professor Stevens' letter refers to the CORE economics curriculum. The website for CORE describes it thus:
The Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics (CORE) project was set up in October 2013 to propose a new approach to economics teaching for undergraduates. The aim is to update the existing economics curriculum so that it reflects recent developments in economics, the economy and in teaching methods.
Funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking and based at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford in the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, the Project Director is Professor Wendy Carlin of University College London. Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India, is a key partner and responsible for the design and technological development of the CORE course materials.
The CORE website can be found here.
3) The Robin Cosgrove Prize which is awarded to a young person who writes a hitherto unpublished paper on the benefits of ethics in finance. Website here: http://www.robincosgroveprize.org/
Other resources:
Manifesto for finance that serves the common good (academic signatories) -here
Basel Manifesto on the economic enlightenment (Zentrum fur Religion, Wirtschaft und Politik) http://www.zrwp.ch/uploads/basel_manifesto.pdf - 2012
Rethinking economics, a student initiative, - http://www.rethinkeconomics.org/ together with ISIPE (International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics (among Scottish universities, only Glasgow is associated, 60 countries involved) http://www.isipe.net/open-letter/
Academic contributions on new economic thinking http://ineteconomics.org/institute-blog/archive/201502 with reference to new CORE curriculum developed internationally with support University College London (Curriculum Open Access Resources in Economics) (see above).
Beyond the financial crisis - Towards a Christian perspective for action – Simona Beretta and Paul Dembinski - Working paper 4 - The Caritas in Veritate Foundation, Geneva, June 2014
[Online: http://www.obsfin.ch/beyond-the-financial-crisis-towards-a-christian-perspective-for-action-2/
Postal financial services and development – building on the past and looking to the future – Gonzales d’Alcantara, Paul Dembinski, Odile Pilley – Universite de Fribourg – Working Paper - August 2014 - doc.rero.ch/record/211111/files/WP_SES_451.pdf
Pope Francis’s speech at the European Parliament – 25 November 2014 - http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2014/11/25/pope_francis_address_to_european_parliament/1112318
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Image details: Russian Icon (C15th or C16th of Jesus teaching in the temple. Wikicommons here.)
I've just read the letter from Margaret Stevens in full and I find it rather extraordinary. She seems to think that teaching multiple schools of thought will result in her students not becoming economists....I had imagined that economics students would have the critical skills to discuss and compare different schools of economic thought and perhaps come to some conclusions about who they were in agreement with and why (and conversely). And the reference to teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened...well, good of course...but decades? Sometimes a long view is good too..
ReplyDeleteOn the long view, I assume that she means not that longer periods shouldn't also be studied (or at least, she's making no statement about that) but that (unlike in her view current economics education) the last three decades shouldn't be ignored. (The crucial thought I suspect being that current economics ideology ignores the evidence in the last three decades that suggests the ideology is wrong.)
DeleteOn the matter of comparing different schools, again, I read her not as suggesting that comparing different schools mightn't be part of an economics syllabus, but that the mere comparison of schools, particularly if they both share major assumptions (big vs little 'endians'), is not sufficient to develop the toolbox of skills an economist needs. (I experienced a bit of this myself when in the eighties as an accountant we were taught Keynsian vs monetarist economics as a fairly mechanical contrast without much sense of how to resolve the clash (well, TBH, probably with a fair bias towards monetarism!) and certainly no sense of a wider toolbox which would put this clash in some sort of deeper context.
Anyway that's my best stab at a charitable interpretation!
(Could I ask all those posting as 'anonymous' to state a name (even an assumed one!). Although I can often guess who's posting, it's not always clear!)
BTW: Just for fun (and also perhaps because it embodies Stevens' view of what modern economic education currently is like!) the Keynes v Hayek rap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S77BiQWqES4
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