Mainstream Economics : Searching Where the Light is

A striking feature of today’s economics discipline is the amount of methodological consensus. This is very exceptional for a social science. Take any introductory textbook to sociology, history, international relations theory,... and different approaches to the discipline will be developed alongside each other. It earns them names such as ‘pre-paradigmatic science’, the idea being that scholars of these disciplines haven’t yet made up their minds, that the discipline hasn’t been developed enough, etc. Economics seems to be one of the only social sciences to have outgrown this stage, earning them the status of most developed social science and giving rise to “economic imperialism”. Economics textbooks usually pay little attention to the different approaches. The story of competing schools in economics is something from the past; as such it is banned from the core courses to a peripheral course on economic history. In some countries there are even plans to ban courses on the history of economics from economics departments altogether. This seems like a benign evolution because it reminds of past scientific successes in which competing schools were abandoned to give way to the successful approach. Examples are the discussion between the miasma and the germ theory of disease and that between Wegener’s theory of continental drift and a number of rival theories.