Monday, April 14, 2014

A Third Revised Family Tree of Heterodox Economics

The third revised diagram, and this time I have added a general line for left libertarian economics, which culminates in the Participatory economics system.

6 comments:

  1. Done.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_economics

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    Replies
    1. Regarding your Heterodox Economic School, clearly you are making up your own strange view of heterodox economics. It is not founded on any extensive research--you appear to have never read the only real history of heterodox economics: A History of Heterodox Economics. As one of a couple of people who worked very hard in the early years circa 1998-2002 to construct the community of heterodox economics (one other person is Phil O'Hara) and putting together the Heterodox Economics Newsletter, it seems a bit odd that you do not draw upon their contributions when constructing your map. You seem to think that you can define heterodox economics anyway you want to. A few other points--you say Marxism but not radical political economy--both are relevant to heterodox economics; you put in parecon--that approach has made no contributions to heterodox economics; you exclude social economics and feminist economics; you some how suggest that heterodox economics existed prior to 1990 if not 1970--which is wrong since it only became to emerge in the late 1980s and the first real usage of the term appears in the 1990s and the first heterodox economics association/conference appear in 1999; and finally you do not suggest that one aspect of heterodox economics is to develop an overarching heterodox economic theory that brings together in a theoretical coherent manner various aspects of the various heterodox schools. Instead of speculating about what heterodox economics is, you should actually show up and give papers at the Association of Heterodox Economics, Society of Heterodox Economists, Association for Evolutionary Economics, Association for Institutional Thought, Association for Social Economics, Unin of Radical Political Economics, Conference of Social Economists, International Associstion of Feminist Economists, European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, and many other heterodox associations annual conferences/meetings.

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    2. I would have included Development Structuralists, social economics and feminist economics and others, but scarcity of space on the diagram makes that difficult.

      As for not having founded the diagram "on any extensive research", I have been reading heterodox economics for over 15 years. The diagram draws on articles in the Elgar Companion to Radical Political Economy, Elgar Companion to Post Keynesian Economics, and King’s A History of Post Keynesian Economics since 1936 (to name a few), and this talk by Marc Lavoie on heterodox economics.

      In fact, the divisions I use largely follow those of Marc Lavoie in the talk, so it is rather puzzling to be told that I’m “making up” my “own strange view of heterodox economics”.

      Also, the diagram does not mean to suggest that heterodox economics (as you define it) existed fully fledged prior to the 1980s: but the economic traditions on which heterodox schools draw certainly did, and they are there for historical clarity and interest, to set out the ancestry (if you like) of modern heterodox schools.

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  2. I suppose Veblen goes at the start of the "Old" Institutionalists.

    This points up the immediate problem for academic development. The institutionalists and the MMTers need to start talking to each other. On the whole, there seems to be pretty good dialogue between the different traditions of "broad tent" Post-Keynesianism, even though they are different traditions -- but the institutionalists are off there in a different box.

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