ABSTRACT
Just to show that we too can theorize, how about some pure theory of economic education? Here follows a five-step theory of pluralism:
1 Economic life is complex, and some elements of it are easier to know than others. Nobody can know everything about the billions of daily actions and transactions that constitute it. So
2 Any investigation of it has to select what activities to investigate, how far and in what directions to trace their causes and necessary conditions, and how to go about it: what language, identities, categories, collectives and simplifications to employ, and so on. What you hope to use the knowledge for – or, if you are driven by pure curiosity, the aspects of the subject that interest you – should join with technical considerations in shaping your selections. That is another way of saying that your values and social purposes should shape them. Some at least of those values and purposes are bound to be controversial (there are no perfectly unanimous societies). So
3 Your discoveries are likely to be as controversial as the values and purposes that have shaped the search. That does not imply that they must be untrue, or that rival conclusions about similar subjects must necessarily contradict one another. For example: neoclassical economists have explained why substantial unemployment can restrain inflation: Swedes have shown how peak national wage-bargaining can restrain it; Australians have shown how income policies administered by independent institutions can restrain it; John K. Galbraith’s first book explained how his US price controls restrained inflation in wartime. In the conditions of their time and place, all four got their facts right and knew what they were doing. Contradictions only set in if one party (the neoclassicists in this instance) insist that theirs is the only true analysis or the only workable policy and the others must be mistaken. (There can also, of course, be any amount of untruth, irrelevance, impracticality or deliberate deception in studies by less competent investigators than those four.) It follows:
4 That democracies that value free thought and speech, and access to government for contending interests and opinions, should encourage similar breadth and disagreement in their economic education. And
5 In democracies that accord expert status to their social scientists, there are critical relations between self-interest and disinterested expertise, both between contending groups and within the minds of their individual members. It is important that these relations be understood, and acknowledged and studied in the education of economists.
