ABSTRACT
Economics education is not a zero-sum game; on the contrary, detouring into political economy can only enrich our understanding of traditional economics. Fortunately, some of us learned traditional economics from the ground up. By this we mean that we were allowed to interrogate its assumptions and tease out its implications. This challenged us to seek the limits of every fact or theory and find in them new prospects, new perspectives, and new possibilities. As one of our professors said, “Orthodoxy is one way to tell the economics story. There are many others.” Notre Dame, the storied institution of learning and football, has an even more storied Department of Economics. Long regarded as a refuge for out-of-theordinary and not-quite-mainstream economists, the Department prided itself on being different. During the 1970s it built an eclectic Economics Department focusing on labor, development, and public policy programs, with the goal of fostering an intellectual environment encouraging discourse between traditional and political economic approaches. During the 1980s, however, forces inside and outside the department pressured for change. Self-comparison to “peerinstitutions” – Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and others – pressured Notre Dame to follow suit. In 2003, after years of internecine struggle, the department split into the Department of Economics and Econometrics and the Department of Economics and Policy Studies. The former focuses on rigorous, mathematical modeling while the latter focuses on socio-economic justice with an openness to competing methodologies. The former gets more money, the graduate program, and all the new hires, while the other gets . . . marginalized. This is the situation we found upon arriving at Notre Dame as undergraduates. None of us began as economics majors; three of us started at the College of Engineering. We were all inspired, however, by our first economics class, which fortuitously happened to be pluralist. We studied traditional economics but only as one of many stories that could be told about the economy. We scrutinized each assumption and imagined how each theory would look with its assumptions turned upside down. Little did we know that this kind of economics education was the exception, not the rule. We soon found out. But looking back (and around!) we consider ourselves lucky – lucky to have attended a university that still has remnants of a political economy program and,
above all, lucky to have been introduced early to the political economy approach. Whether through just a passing mention in an introductory course or a full semester devoted to a political economy course, we were imbued with a questioning ethic – a little nagging voice that asked, “What are the assumptions here?” or “What is being left out?” This microscopic focus is too often ignored in the teaching of traditional economics. Instead of passive acceptance of theory – which is too often dogmatically presented – our first course enabled us to ask, “Is there another way to tell this story?” Unfortunately, many students are not so lucky. Even at Notre Dame which has a handful of dedicated political economists, most students go four years without any exposure to “alternatives” – and are therefore led to believe that none exist. Students reared in an exclusively traditional environment are presented one economic story as the absolute truth. Fortunately, we were taught differently. Early exposure to political economy enabled us to tease out differences and implications. First encounters with new ideas usually entail a baggage of misunderstandings. We know this as well as anyone. By engaging early and often with political economy, we developed a dynamic understanding of traditional economics and political economy. We know both well enough to use them in our discussions, debates, and analyses. Giving students a well-rounded education no doubt take time – a scarce resource in college – but, as we stress throughout this chapter, learning political economy enables a richer and deeper understanding of traditional economics. Yes, I know it’s counter-intuitive, but learning economics as students normally do – that is, in a purely instrumental way – is bereft of a rich understanding of the historical evolution of the concepts and their implications. This lack of understanding becomes palpable when friends from other disciplines question concepts and assumptions from traditional economics. It is humbling to find students who have never taken an economics course but display a deeper understanding of the concepts and critiques of traditional economics than most economics majors. How do we reply when our friends from anthropology, history or physics (the holy grail of science!) unleash criticism after criticism of the traditional assumptions if we don’t know anything else? They press us with questions about our irrational rationality assumption or our methodological individualism or the lack of – take your pick – culture, ethics, power, exploitation, corruption, psychology, and more, in our economic theorizing. We’ve experienced it too many times. It would do economics students a service to, at the very least, introduce them to the basic criticisms of traditional economics to save an embarrassing stutter, “Well . . . you see . . . supply and demand . . . you know . . . the invisible hand,” in response to every inquisition. Humility is an invaluable asset which is sorely lacking among traditional economists. In brash defiance of its critics, traditional economics commands reverence from non-economists. It bids all other subjects to bow in obeisance to the queen of the social sciences. Friends from the business school, the “hard” and “soft” sciences, the humanities, and engineering join econ majors to learn traditional
economics via Samuelson or Mankiw. These are the world’s future doers and thinkers, hoping to forge new and creative ideas, yet learning old and hackneyed economics. We are a generation with bold ambitions – to end global poverty, to solve the food crisis, to overcome global warming – but are handed an economic framework with stark and limited possibilities. When we try to push the boundaries of the possible, traditional economics stubbornly pushes back. For a discipline so narrow, economics continues to attract a diverse crowd. We fear, however, that students from other disciplines will assume that this superficial and non-critical view of economics is the only way to understand the economy. Some call it disciplinary imperialism. We call it creativity eradication. So how did we end up in this strange state of economics, where a free market of ideas is crushed under the hegemonic monopoly of traditional economics? Its assumptions are so ingrained in our culture that when students take their first economics course, they may already have accepted the homo economicus model of human nature. Political economy does not battle traditional economics just in the classroom, but increasingly in our culture as well. Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics (2006), heavily influenced by the Chicago School, has sold over three million copies, simultaneously making economics a “cool” major and introducing a whole new generation of students to the idea that traditional economics can be applied anywhere, everywhere, and to anything. The four of us came to economics, troubled by a world steeped in poverty and inequality, and suffering resource shortages, religious wars, and global warming. We were told simultaneously that the world is flat, the individual sacred, and the inefficient profane. Instead of investigating intricate problems from sundry angles, students enrolled in a traditional economics course are given a single package of equations and assumptions with the label “non-perishable: good always and everywhere.” Out of the arc of economic possibilities, traditional economics claims an infallible truth. Students expecting a more open method of analysis are discouraged – that is the purview of those other social sciences. When we questioned our Department Chair about informal economies, he retorted that economics doesn’t really deal with them. “But they are economies,” we insisted, “that by some estimates add up to trillions of dollars a year – totally unaccounted for in GDP! Think of the implications for development policy!” After several seconds of silence, the Chair suggested we look for help outside of the Economics Department. Students study economics believing it can help solve the pressing issues of today; instead they find an insular and abstract economics lacking its promised practical applicability. Students are corralled around the Thanksgiving table, hoping for a sumptuous spread, only to find . . . stuffing . . . stuffing . . . and more stuffing. What could have been a feast turns out to be a forced-feeding. Traditional economics courses mass-produce economic doers, not economic thinkers. Our education has become wholly instrumental. Open up any economics textbook and find page after page of polished graphs and mathematical
formulas, often highlighted in colorful boxes. It is generally understood that inside those pastel partitions is all we need to know – at least to pass the next exam, or get into graduate school, or devise economic policy. So rather than understand what the model is saying – we memorize, memorize, memorize. Last year, for an exam in advanced macroeconomics, the professor gave us a “study aid” with all the needed formulas. On test day, students arrived with the equations memorized (easily done in ten minutes) and had no problem answering the questions. We imagined our professor beaming with pride that students did so well, especially given the opening exhortation to “teach us how to do economics the way professional economists do.” This, unfortunately, is a triumph of efficiency over creativity: a “plug and chug” method that makes reproduction and replication easy at the steep cost of understanding the economy. Granted, not everyone wants to wrestle with the intricacies of theory; some just want the tools – honed by centuries of great thinkers – to do economics. There is nothing wrong with that. But we see economics education moving decidedly in the direction of imparting purely instrumental knowledge. We see a one-dimensional economics education that stresses the doing but not the thinking. Today, academic economists work long hours in their offices, building models, theorizing, but not peering out their windows at the world. Orthodoxy is a magnificent hammer, but sometimes you need a wrench or a screwdriver. The confrontation between the visible and invisible hand is nowhere more apparent (or ironic) than on our campuses – ironic because of the ostensible disagreement between what is taught in our economics classes and what students think when they buy consumer goods. A handful of us involved in the living wage campaign at Notre Dame are also economics majors. We look past the simplistic argument that wage distortions will cause market inefficiency to questions of justice. College is and should be an opportunity for a cosmopolitan education. Many embrace this chance, adopting broader world-views and expanded moral sensibilities. But in the traditional economics classroom, these ideals and opinions are to be left at the door. Last year, we asked faculty and administrators, “Why is history of economic thought not required for the major while econometrics is? Why can’t the ideas of political economy be introduced in our introductory courses? And why are there fewer and fewer political economy courses offered at the upper levels?” The unambiguous response was that those theories are just not practical; they don’t get students into top-tier graduate school or help in the business world. Above all, they said, there just isn’t the demand. Is this true? Are students here and elsewhere really indifferent to alternative ideas? This year at Notre Dame, classes in Marxian economic theory, political economy, consumption and happiness, and history of economic thought filled up completely. Marxian economic theory even had a waiting list. Our peers at Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT, and elsewhere are also demanding courses beyond traditional economics. We’ve met students interested in economic policy and development, and, more importantly, in alternatives to traditional economics. It is not a lack of interest, but rather a lack of opportunity that conditions the mass
production of traditional economists. It is simple supply-and-demand; except here, supply is artificially separated from demand. The rigorous, analytic thinking encouraged in traditional courses is laudable; yet at the same time it is important that economists understand the complicated details of real-world problems. Analytical thinking is a double-edged sword: it helps only if we know how to use it. If not, it will be indiscriminately applied to every problem. This narrowness isn’t desirable; it’s deadly. We believe the situation can change; in fact we believe it already is changing. The four of us found each other through a shared desire for a more pluralistic economics education. We soon found like-minded others from inside and outside the major. We supplemented our traditional economics training with an out-ofclass discussion group. Imagine a dozen or so students who could be more “efficiently” spending their time on homework or studying, huddled around a table that is half-a-dozen people too small, talking about economics. These gatherings were centered on articles chosen by the group in advance to be dissected, discussed, and debated. We relished the chance to talk about interesting and relevant topics in ways were not possible in most of our economics classes. We could engage each problem in a dialogue with orthodoxy and its many alternatives. Here, we could question assumptions, interrogate generalities, and ask about the morality of it all. Try doing that in a traditional economics class. We have – it isn’t pretty. After a year, we happily report the discussion group is still going strong. While this was highly satisfying to us, we realized we could not be indifferent to the larger issue of the lack of pluralism in economics education. The loss for our fellow students is too great, and the stakes – in terms of poverty, policy, international development, and other crucial issues – are too high. We went beyond our discussion group. We reached out to other students and wrote letters to the faculty and administration voicing our discontent. In May of 2007, the four of us wrote an Open Letter to the Notre Dame community expressing our dissatisfaction with the economics situation we had inherited. In addition to the letter, we started an online petition addressing our concerns. Within days we had several hundred signatures and an incredible outpouring of support. This was encouraging, yet we were cognizant of the insurmountable barrier posed by the dominance of traditional economics in the classroom. In order to make real progress, we had to bridge the gap between our extracurricular discussion group and inclass education. Our idea was to create a class – led by students – to allow for an expansive study of a specific economic issue. Several of us got together and wrote a syllabus and got approval from the university to teach a one credit seminar in the spring of 2009. The topic is “Alternatives to the firm,” which differs from the standard economics course by incorporating articles, documentaries, and guest lectures to promote in-depth discussion and debate. Instead of coming into each class insisting, “This is how you should think about this topic,” we ask, “How should we think about this – and how can we think differently?” Through these student-run classes and discussion groups, we are reclaiming our education. This alternative education will enable us to interrogate the pre-
packaged training of today’s orthodoxy. When we find our education lacking, when we have questions that go unanswered, we will learn elsewhere. We readily admit that eschewing the neoclassical classroom is only a shortrun reaction to the problem, not a long-run solution. We don’t pretend to have a single, quick-fix solution – that would be very unpluralistic of us. But we have several observations and recommendations on how to change economics for the better. How can economics be taught so that it is both challenging and engaging? How do we connect its historical development with contemporary applications? And how can we learn economics that is “real” while acknowledging the barriers? These are indeed colossal tasks. Our education is monopolized by orthodoxy. This is as true at Notre Dame as it is for our friends at Harvard and MIT. As undergraduates, students learn orthodoxy without unpacking its real-life implications, or connecting the theory with reality. This poverty of alternatives is the first obstacle we confront. In addition, there is a palpable political reality: because of orthodoxy’s despotic position in academia, the range of what an economics major can “safely” study is unfortunately very slim. If we want to be “real economists” we are warned against taking classes from those “faux economists” who don’t subscribe to the orthodox paradigm. We are told that if we want to get into a “real” graduate program, we had better not take that class in Marxian economics. We should load up on math classes or, better yet, major in mathematics. The hegemony of orthodoxy powerfully forms and shapes economics education. One solution is to learn traditional economics better. Yes, we want orthodox theory, but in dialogue with alternatives. We want to study economics from the infinite perspectives in which it is lived. Theory viewed this way becomes a human product rather than a divine law. By denaturalizing traditional theory, students are empowered to think differently. If we are to implement a more pluralist and open economics education, a reevaluation of standard teaching practices is in order. Orthodoxy is often taught dogmatically and badly at that. But heterodoxy can be taught badly too. We do not expect a Dead Poets Society education in every class but, let’s face it, there are ways that economics can be taught more pluralistically and more informatively. A suggested solution is to construct classes based on “case studies.” We care about development, the environment, the financial crisis, labor rights, and other issues. These problems are global in nature and global in consequences, requiring fundamental new approaches in analysis, understanding, and teaching. As students, we do not expect an elixir; and even if we did, we don’t expect professors – traditional or political economists – to have the answers. We want to dive into these issues with all their problems and implications. We want to think differently. We want to grab an idea, turn it upside down, twist it, and see something new. In a course on environmental economics, for example, rather than a traditional professor pontificating, “This is the proper and only lens through which to view the environment,” we would leave it more open. Instead of only giving answers, we would ask questions – “How should we value and use our resources?” and “What are the different methods of treating externalities?”
