Editorial Policy

Editorial Policy

Your proposal needs to be original, unpublished elsewhere, and should relate to one or more of these subject areas:

• Conference and other news from the Rethinking network
• Book reviews, especially for our notable supporters
• Articles that relate to curriculum reform and greater pluralism in economics. These might focus on theory, methodology or data problems
• Activism reports from the broader movement for pluralism in economics, such as ISIPE
• The impact of a lack of pluralism on policy debates

Content should be…

• Focused.. topical, in terms of the question asked or issue raised
• Accessible… with terms defined and good referencing of concepts
• Presentable… with diagrams or charts to aid the reader and a suitable image to increase the chances of people clicking on it

Please submit in Word format (DOC or RTF) to rethinking-economics-blog[at]googlegroups.com. 500-1000 words are suggested, and you are strongly encourage to include a (copyright-free) photograph for distribution on social media.

The Review Process
We have a lightweight peer review process, that is informal and exploratory. Encouraging and responding positively to comments will increase your chances of publication. Accepted proposals will be promoted via the RE newsletter and social media.

You can read about the Editorial team here.

To Apply as a Blog Editor
Applications are welcome at any time. Please email rethinking-economics-blog[at]googlegroups.com with a a short statement explaining why you make a good Editor. Your commitment needs to be a few hours per week for an initial 12 months.

Who is Rethinking Economics?

We're young and international!

Rethinkers are most likely to be aged 18-34, but could be anywhere in the world...

London, Oxford, Cambridge, New Delhi, Berlin, Manchester, Lisbon, São Paulo, New York, Vienna, Washington, Bangkok, Lahore, Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Copenhagen, Paris, Islamabad, Rio, Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney (NSW), Milan..

and many, many more!

Why Economics Should Be Rethought

The Assumptions About Human Nature Hidden Behind the Respectable Veil of Economic Analysis

Author: Anonymous

Economic decisions in government are evaluated using cost-benefit analysis. Thus the Department for Transport established that a high-speed north-south rail link (HS2) was good value for money by determining that every £1 of cost to the taxpayer would lead to at least £1.8 of benefits. And what could be more sensible than carefully weighing up the pros and cons of a decision to society in order to determine the preferred option? Behind the illusion of rigour and dispassionate logic, however, are a number of assumptions about what humans are which many of us would surely not subscribe to. And yet, the actions of almost all public bodies supposedly acting in our interests, from the Bank of England to the International Monetary Fund, work on exactly this basis.

Perhaps the most brazen assumption is that humans’ wellbeing is purely determined by their lifetime consumption. Undeterred by 2500 years of philosophical debate on the source of human happiness, Economics proceeds with its own simple prescription. An esteemed economist has argued that the profession has got away with this for so long because sources of happiness other than consumption are at least a function of it. For example, a plausible alternative view of human happiness is that it is status-driven, determined by a citizen’s level of consumption relative to others. In this case, a policy that increases a citizen’s individual consumption would also increase their relative consumption, so increased wellbeing would still be achieved. This argument falls flat, however the moment a policy is applied to a nation rather than an individual. If a government policy increases all its citizens’ consumption by the same amount, then their relative consumption will not have changed so they will be no happier than they were at the start. So even this small tweak to the standard Economics view of human happiness would call into question much of government economic policy. And in any case, presuming that our happiness is predicated purely on the amount of phones and clothes we buy surely paints an unduly shallow picture of humanity.

Economics also assumes that humans care less about the future than the present, and in a banal sense there is some truth to this. Putting the tub of ice cream in the fridge for later, for instance, tends to be harder than eating it straight away. However when it comes to assessing something more consequential like how much we care about the damage that climate change will inflict, can it still be justified to assume that we value the future less? This could lead to the absurd conclusion that a policy which ended humanity would be economically acceptable if the apocalypse happened sufficiently far in the future that the lost happiness of the dead future generations was deemed to be negligible by today’s myopic citizens. Arguably the inadequacy of public pressure to force any significant political action on climate change demonstrates that people today don’t in fact care about the future effects of climate change or are at least sceptical about its impact. That is not to say that they would not feel regret once the consequences become more apparent, however. But this capacity to change one’s mind and feel remorse is again excluded from the economic decision-making process.

Evidently the view of human nature assumed in economic policy-making is a narrow one, and yet it issued not just to make decisions in the Western world but to impose polices on countries across the globe via the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Thus this view of humanity, borne from the traditions of Western economists is taken as the basis for policies in cultures with countless different philosophical traditions and a wealth of perspectives on human nature. Would Economics not be more powerful if a different variant existed for each view on what humans are? Perhaps in this way Economics could be rethought.

Rethinking Economics: a New Conference this Weekend

For those of you who aren’t already there, our Rethinking Economics conference began in London this afternoon. The conference will be running all weekend and we would love to have you join us.

If you’d like to find out more about this event, Yuan Yang has written a guest blog post for one of our partners, the New Economics Foundation (NEF): http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/rethinking-economics-a-new-conference-this-weekend. Check the schedule at http://www.rethinkecon.co.uk/#!schedule/cihc and come join the conversation.

We would love to hear from you, whether you are attending the conference or not. Please fill out our survey, which can be found at http://www.rethinkecon.co.uk/#!yourthoughts/c187x.

Rethinking for Action

Author: Diana García López

Teaching economics is a political act. What you discuss (or not) in your seminar, what you include (or not) in the syllabus, shapes the minds of generations of economists. Academics create and perpetuate economic theories that inform and ultimately justify policies that affect society as a whole.

The last decades have seen the economics syllabus become narrower and narrower. A student who studied economics in the 60s would have received a much broader education than many UK undergraduates today. Recently, a lecturer in economics at a leading UK university even compared the fading of non-neoclassical schools of thought to the abandonment of treatments like leeches, tobacco smoke enemas and homeopathy by the medical profession. His students are not systematically exposed to the history of economic thought; some of them have never heard of Keynes in their lectures (let alone of Marx), and are frustrated because what they are taught has little relationship to the current real-world economic problems that attracted them to the study of economics in the first place. Critical thinking is not encouraged; prospective young lecturers are valued in terms of how much they have published in ‘the correct’ few mainstream journals.

Meanwhile, the UK (and Europe) has got stuck in a socio-economical and political impasse in which new answers are needed urgently. Suddenly the economics jargon has invaded the news and concerned citizens have become amateur economists, trying to understand what is going on, with the perception that economics can no longer be left exclusively to the supposed experts who “didn’t see it coming”. We have thus seen the development of a broad range of civil-society groups who share a focus on practical solutions and action, while differing in methods, scope and specific objectives (e.g. New Economics Foundation, Positive Money, Jubilee Debt Campaign, World Development Movement, Strike Debt, Robin Hood Tax, City Reform Group, UK Uncut, to name a few).

Successful efforts to increase coordination and exchange have taken place in the last few weeks, for example at the Transforming Finance conference [10 May 2013] that brought together academics, finance professionals and campaigners “to discuss how to make finance work in the long-term interests of the people and planet”. Last Saturday [22 June 2013], after weeks of preparation including an endorsement by 63 economists, Central Hall in Westminster saw 4000 campaigners from different backgrounds historically join forces in a People’s Assembly against austerity.

We are witnessing how the government’s budget cuts target the poor and the weakest in society – e.g. two thirds of people hit by the bedroom tax are disabled (as if it was the poor who had the money to reduce the debt!). The program to dismantle the welfare state is being implemented not only in the UK but all across Europe; entwined with the vicious circle of bad debt it leads to social collapse as the unfolding Greek tragedy shows. The respective ‘opposition’ parties across Europe have also accepted the “they/we deserved it; there is no alternative” belief. Only a few brave black sheep are left, armed with facts that nobody wants to hear.

The UK alone boasts 3 new food banks every week, with 13.5m people under the poverty line, 2.5m unemployed, 1.8m households on council house waiting-lists, and 25000 elderly people freezing to death at home every year because they can’t afford to pay their heating bills, just to mention a few figures. To me and to many this is not what a civilized society looks like.

Answers are needed to overcome this worsening situation, and in my opinion students and academics have a moral responsibility to participate in the production of such practical answers. As with everything we do, there is a whole spectrum of positions, each of which implies some degree of contradiction. The question is what degree of contradiction one is prepared to assume.

The clock of history is ticking; an answer is expected from the economics academics. I reckon it’s time to take a look outside the academic bubble, to descend from the high tower and reconnect the economics discipline with its roots – with the society it was always meant to serve.