ABSTRACT
Introducing pluralism into labor economics should be relatively easy; after all, labor economics has historically been a very pluralistic field. For the first half of the twentieth century, courses in labor were dominated by Institutional economists and were often called “labor problems,” because they dealt with actual labor markets rather than with abstract models. Major contributions to the field have also been made, and are still being made, by Marxist radical economists and feminist scholars. However, in recent years these alternative approaches have been almost completely eliminated from the study of labor economics at the undergraduate level and even in many graduate programs. As a result, the task of reintroducing pluralism into the undergraduate labor economics course means that instructors will have few resources to draw upon.1 Moreover, the “core” orthodoxy now expected in a standard course leaves little room for adding more material. Thus, while introducing pluralism into labor economics is a worthy goal, it may seem like a daunting task. There are two ways to incorporate the wide diversity of approaches into a labor economics course. One, introduce alternative schools of thought: and two, introduce the idea of economic pluralism. Each of these two approaches has distinct advantages and disadvantages. The choice of which approach will be most appropriate and most successful depends on the teaching environment and on the interests and capabilities of the students. Julie Nelson, Chapter 6 above, “The principles course,” distinguishes between a paradigmatic framework that “focuses on argumentation between (or among) different schools” and a pluralistic one, that “while not being uncritical or seeking false unity, involves a less adversarial effort to examine reality from different perspectives.” As voiced by other contributors to this volume, several problems exist with the paradigmatic approach. In many colleges and universities, the economics curriculum provides students with very little background on alternative approaches to orthodoxy. In fact, students may have little exposure even to relatively recent contributions to traditional economics that deviate from the conventional orthodoxy.2 Thus, it might be unreasonable to expect students with little knowledge of history of thought (other than orthodoxy) to tackle additional schools of thought as part of their labor economics course. Students have just spent an entire course learning the basics of traditional orthodox
microeconomics, often required as a prerequisite for labor economics; it is unrealistic then to expect them to reach the same level of familiarity with other schools of thought in just a few weeks. The second approach to introducing economic pluralism establishes a more modest and realistic goal of introducing students to the existence of pluralism in labor economics without overloading the course with new material. The organizing principle is to introduce key labor topics along with alternative views or perspectives for each topic as appropriate. The primary objective is to teach labor economics; learning about alternative economic doctrines is a secondary objective. A weakness of the traditional approach to labor economics is that the course is more about orthodox microeconomics than labor economics, which as Chapter 6 above demonstrated is fraught with its own internal contradictions. Putting the primary emphasis on schools of thought and then choosing sides would only compound this problem.
