Economics for the future

Many of us decided to study economics because we were interested in issues such as economic growth, unemployment, poverty, discrimination and social exclusion. And for much of the history of the discipline, economists grappled with explaining such phenomena and, hopefully, helped to improve the development of economic policy. But now the discipline is increasingly dominated by other concerns, such as mathematical rigour and econometric modelling. The New York Times columnist, Michael Weinstein, recalled how his passion to learn economics, which was driven by a desire to understand the causes of poverty and the impact of technical change, was immediately quelled when on his first day as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the professor announced that ‘all of economics is a subset of the theory of separating hyperplans’ (Weinstein, 2000). The subject has become so obscure that even orthodox economists are bemoaning its intellectual poverty. According toMilton Friedman, ‘economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems’ (Friedman, 1999, p.137). And Robert Solow has observed: ‘Today if you ask a mainstream economist a question about almost any aspect of economic life, the response will be: suppose we model that situation and see what happens. . .modern mainstream economics consists of little else but examples of this process’ (quoted in Lawson, 2005). So many economists are now increasingly engaged in research and teaching that is disconnected from the issues that influence people’s lives, as Long (2005) observed: ‘academic economists remain hidden in their ivory towers. They are neither household names nor a significant presence in newspaper commentary pages. How strange for a country that produced the most famous economists of all time: Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes’. But not all remain hidden in their ivory towers: there are a few who do influence the policy domain, but they come from the intellectually narrow sect of neoclassical economics. And there are those from the neoclassical sect who have managed to infiltrate popular culture by throwing away the maths, packaging their prose in airport-style books and entertaining their readers with stories about why sumo wrestlers cheat and why drug pushers live with their mums (see Levitt and Dubner, 2005). As modern orthodox economics moves away from reality, there is both the opportunity and the need for heterodox economics to orientate economics towards