Pluralism in economics

The pluralism in economics movement is a campaign to eliminate any monism in economics, including the substantive and methodological monism that its proponents believe currently dominates mainstream academic economics. While economics has always been viewed as displaying scientific pluralism, the pluralism movement in economics sees the underlying methodology of economic studies as being monist in its approach - both theoretically, and institutionally. Pluralist groups encourage the inclusion of a wide variety of neoclassical and heterodox economic theories - including Austrian, feminist, Marxian, institutional, and evolutionary economics - some stating that "each tradition of thought adds something unique and valuable to economic scholarship."

The current movement for pluralism arose in the 1990s, when many critics of mainstream economics began to describe themselves as proponents of pluralism - and formed groups or organizations such as the The International Confederation of Associations for Reform in Economics (ICARE) or the post-autistic economics movement. Campaigns to gain public, and academic, attention were launched, including a "rebellion" of students at the École Normale Supérieure in 2000, and a petition published as a paid advertisement in May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, which described itself as a "plea for a pluralistic and rigorous economics". However, not all critics of mainstream economics favored pluralistic practice, often calling for "reform" instead - which prompted many pluralist organizations to distance themselves instead. For example, ICARE became ICAPE - replacing the R ("reform") with P ("pluralism") in their name, stating that "'reform' ... does not properly characterize the nature or purpose of our organization..."

See also

• Heterodox economics
• Mainstream economics

External links

External links to pluralist groups/journals

Some of the groups dedicated to the movement for pluralism in economics are:

• The International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics - "ICAPE ... seeks to foster intellectual pluralism and a sense of collective purpose and strength among these heterodox organizations."
• The Association for Heterodox Economics - themes of its annual conferences include "Pluralism in Economics" (2005), "Economics, Pluralism, and the Social Sciences" (2006), and "Pluralism in Action" (2007).
• The Post-autistic Economics Network - publishing papers on pluralism.
• The International Working Group on Value Theory - "promote[s] pluralistic debate on concepts of value ... [and an] end [to] the unacceptable exclusion of the value theory of Karl Marx". Also publishes the Critique of Political Economy, a forthcoming journal that describes itself as "critical-pluralistic"