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Latest episode discusses the proposition that we are experiencing a paradigm shift in economics, away from subjective opinion and toward objective models.

jonahmann wrote:Latest episode discusses the proposition that we are experiencing a paradigm shift in economics, away from subjective opinion and toward objective models.

That paradigm shift has been happening for a long, long time.. if anything Economics is moving away from objective models and back to subjective opinion. The failure of the neoclassical models to predict the most recent crisis has caused people to take note of differing schools of thought. I graduated this year and got an email from my uni claiming they're providing heterodox masters courses, the students at Manchester University were protesting about the heavily neoclassical focus of their course a year or 2 ago and the uni I'm hopefully gunna do my masters at offers heterodox courses.. they focus a lot on the ideas of classical economics and even political philosophers. Pluralism, the idea that there isn't one unified theory, is becoming increasingly popular.. so I disagree, at least in education and real economists (by that I mean economists who are unbiased, don't have a vested interested.. aren't financial tycoons/active in politics), theres a move away from objective models and toward (or at least back to) subjective opinion/ideas.

That probably isn't true in the circles who actually matter, politicians, bankers ect. but they certainly aren't moving towards models now, they've been using them for a long time.

Bad form

Muncey - what's a heterodox course and how is it different to a neoclassical course?

wub wrote:Muncey - what's a heterodox course and how is it different to a neoclassical course?

Heterodox just means not orthodox. The orthodox, in both professional and education, has been dominated by neoclassical economics and its always been taught like a science, like its all factual. I went through the first 2 years at uni without being told once "some people disagree with this and think this, this and this." You can have heterodox courses which only focus on one thing just like the orthodox is mostly neoclassical.. example would be studying Marx Political Economy or Austrian Economics.. Pluralism focuses on looking at all or a number of all schools of thought (both orthodox and heterodox), treating it more like Politics rather than Science.

At degree level, outside of your own individual learning, you very rarely hear many Economists names apart from occasionally Keynes or Friedman, you just get taught graphs, equations or "if this happens, this happens". It wasn't until final year we was told "oh btw, some people (at lot in fact) disagree with all that shit we taught you in the first two years."

Heres a table of the major schools of thoughts: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/ ... 5_econ.jpg

jonahmann wrote:Latest episode discusses the proposition that we are experiencing a paradigm shift in economics, away from subjective opinion and toward objective models.

Sounds like the kind of thing that someone who'd never distinguished between the study of economics and business would say.