Letters: Post-Keynesians are staging a comeback

Publish-Keynesian academics are arranging a comeback. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

We have followed your coverage of student-led calls for far more pluralist teaching in economics with great curiosity (Report, twelve November). We realize students’ disappointment with the way economics is taught in most institutions in the United kingdom. Modern economics is shaped by the neoclassical approach, which regards “microfoundations” based on rational and selfish men and women as much more important than empirical plausibility. This dogmatic commitment contrasts sharply with the openness of teaching in other social sciences, which routinely current competing paradigms. College students can now full a degree in economics with no getting been exposed to the theories of Keynes, Marx, or Minsky, and without getting learned about the Excellent Depression.

There exists a vibrant community of pluralist economists in the Uk and elsewhere, but these academics have been marginalised inside the profession. The shortcomings in the way economics is taught are directly relevant to an intellectual monoculture which is reinforced by a technique of public university funding (the Investigation Excellence Framework), primarily based on journal rankings that are heavily biased in favour of orthodoxy and towards intellectual diversity.

The Publish Keynesian Economics Review Group is committed to financial research and educating with genuine-world relevance. The publish-Keynesian technique emphasises the central relevance of aggregate demand in the macro-economic climate, the issues posed by financial instability in a globe of globalised capital flows, the influence of inequality on economic development, and the result of uncertainty on expectations. In our see, these themes, which hold so much relevance at the present historical second, cannot adequately be encompassed inside of the normal educating models that deal with the economy as quickly self-adjusting in direction of an productive state of complete-employment equilibrium. We applaud the students’ initiative and suggest their criticisms be heard. The solution to the irrelevance of the economics curriculum is not to compose off the discipline, but to insist on the renewal of its core historical considerations with the nature of growth, underemployment and fiscal instability and the distribution of revenue and wealth.
Professor Engelbert Stockhammer Chair, Publish Keynesian Economics Review Group and Kingston University London
Professor Gary Dymski University of Leeds
Dr Mark Hayes Secretary, Submit Keynesian Economics Study Group, University of Cambridge
Dr Annina Kaltenbrunner University of Leeds
Dr Jo Michell University of the West of England
Professor Özlem Onaran University of Greenwich
Dr Jonathan Perraton University of Sheffield

Letters: Post-Keynesians are staging a comeback