Teemu Lari

Ha-Joon Chang, Research Professor of Economics at SOAS University of London, is a vocal advocate of pluralism in economics. He has also campaigned for public understanding of economics and cautioned against an excessive role of economists in policymaking. In this comprehensive interview, Chang talks about his views on economics, pluralism, the role of economists in democracy, as well as his formative years as an economics student. The interview concludes with Chang's advice for young scholars - both economists interested in non-mainstream approaches and non-economists interested in engaging with economists.

This dissertation examines the recent demands for diversifying economics, often advanced under the rubric of pluralism. The dissertation aims at illuminating questions that are foundational to this debate and thereby promoting the resolution of the disagreements. The focus is on the question of whether economics should be open to a wide range of methodological approaches, theoretical frameworks, schools of thought, and so on, in a way that would make the current relatively uniform mainstream approach to economics one among others. The question is considered from the perspective of empirically informed philosophy of science. This approach combines the traditional tools of philosophy, such as critical examination of arguments and concepts, with a multifaceted understanding of science achieved by drawing on sociological, historical and economic research on science. The dissertation consists of four research articles and an introductory essay. Three of these articles examine three corresponding epistemic benefits that increased diversity of approaches and perspectives may be expected to produce. These benefits are the stimulation of inquiry, the reliability of knowledge produced, and the comprehensiveness of attainable knowledge. Each benefit may be used as a premise in arguing that economics should be more diverse than it currently is. Of these three articles, two use Helen Longino’s Critical Contextual Empiricism as the theoretical framework. The fourth article examines the flipside of the benefits, namely, the various costs that securing the benefits may require or that may emerge as side-effects of diversity. This study finds that all the arguments for pluralism examined face challenges. The most pressing challenge is that these arguments often presuppose views about the goals of economics without explicitly arguing for them. While plurality may have certain effects on the knowledge produced by economics, whether these effects are desirable depends on the kinds of epistemic outputs one thinks economics should deliver. However, there is no universal agreement on this. There is no uncontested Common Good against which to measure what changes are improvements. Arguments which do not confront this reality are unlikely to gain wide support. Thus this study highlights the urgency of openly discussing the research agenda and overall aims of the discipline, and helps articulate the views involved in such a discussion by developing suitable conceptual tools. Nevertheless, the most substantial challenges are only faced by views according to which fundamental reform in economics is needed; economics would plausibly benefit from a moderate shift towards openness to non-mainstream approaches and perspectives. At the end, the desirability of a shift towards more intellectual diversity in economics is a matter of costs and benefits. The more modest variations of pluralism one considers, the more likely it is that the benefits outweigh the costs.

After the financial crisis of 2008, many economists expressed dissatisfaction with the state of macroeconomics. They criticised deficiencies in the dominant dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modelling approach and conceptions of good macroeconomic research behind that dominance. This paper argues that there is a deeper problem in macroeconomics, which remains unaddressed. I connect existing literature critical of the institutions of macroeconomics and of economics in general to the institutional preconditions of effective criticism outlined by the philosopher Helen Longino. I find that as an epistemic community, macroeconomics does not function in a way that adequately supports critical evaluation of established beliefs, norms and practices. This failure may partly explain why many views on macroeconomic modelling, the tenability of which economists questioned after the crisis, were able to persist for so long. My analysis gives additional support to several recent proposals for institutional reforms in economics.

The literature on pluralism in economics has focused on the benefits expected from the plurality of theories, methods, and frameworks. This overlooks half of the picture: the costs. Neither have the multifarious costs been systematically analyzed in philosophy of science. We begin rectifying this neglect. We discuss how the benefits of plurality and diversity in science presuppose distinct types of plurality and how various benefit and plurality types are associated with different types of costs. Finally, we ponder how the general mechanisms that give rise to the costs of plurality and diversity are aggravated by various disciplinary characteristics of economics.

I identify and resolve an internal tension in Critical Contextual Empiricism (CCE) – the normative account of science developed by Helen Longino. CCE includes two seemingly conflicting principles: on one hand, the cognitive goals of epistemic communities should be open to critical discussion (the openness of goals to criticism principle, OGC); on the other hand, criticism must be aligned with the cognitive goals of that community to count as “relevant” and thus require a response (the goal-relativity of response-requiring criticism principle, GRC). The co-existence of OGC and GRC enables one to draw both approving and condemning judgments about a situation in which an epistemic community ignores criticism against its goals. This tension results from conflating two contexts of argumentation that require different regulative standards. In the first-level scientific discussion, GRC is a reasonable principle but OGC is not; in the meta-level discussion about science, the reverse holds. In meta-level discussion, the relevance of criticism can be established by appealing to goals of science that are more general than the goals of a specific epistemic community. To illustrate my revision of CCE, I discuss why feminist economists’ criticism of the narrowness of the goals pursued in mainstream economics is relevant criticism.

An intuitively appealing argument for pluralism in economics can be made on the grounds that schools of economic thought complement one another. Let us call this the complementarity-based argument for pluralism (CAP). The concepts of complementarity, pluralism, and school of thought are scrutinized in this paper to evaluate this argument. I argue that the complementarity of schools is relative to scientific goals, which implies that discussing complementarity of schools of economic thought requires discussing the goals of economic research. I also distinguish weak from strong complementarity and show that some alleged complementarity relations between schools are weak and thus provide little support for CAP. However, if strong complementarity relations, relative to a valuable goal, can be demonstrated to exist between specific schools, this is a strong reason for pluralism about those schools. Finally, I provide suggestions on how to distinguish strong from weak complementarity.