Back in April I noted the birth of what is known as Post Crash Economics. You can read this previous post but basically there is a concern that modern economics, in the way it is taught, is too narrow and shuts out alternative perspectives. As stated in the initial Report that was initiated at the University of Manchester:

This lack of competing thought stifles innovation, damages creativity and suppresses the constructive criticisms that are so vital for economic understanding and advancement. There is also a distinct lack of real-world application of economic ideas, with the focus being on abstract modelling that often seems devoid from reality. Finally, the study of ethics, politics and history are almost completely absent from the syllabus. We propose that economics cannot be properly understood with all these aspects excluded.

Well I agree with all of that, but with me it was Pre-Crash Economics as well. There is a need for wider vistas and a recognition that the various heterodox schools within economics ought to be actively engaged within mainstream discussion of economic issues. With a Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and the endorsement of the Institute of Economic Affairs, there is at least a possibility that the PCE movement may not simply become another leftist rant of no consequence.

The first meeting of the Australian PCE Society was held today at the University of Melbourne and I went along. The chap who spoke, who had come all the way from Manchester to discuss what they had in mind. And while there were various moments when his own underlying agenda was all-too-obvious as a long-ago member of the left, his final slide had the words “It’s time to challenge the orthodoxy” and showed a woman with a “power to the people” fist in the air.

I therefore asked the first of the questions from the floor which was more of a comment than a question. And what I said was something like this:

If you would like to set up a group that widens the study of economics and introduces the full range of the various schools of thought to the education of economics students, then I am with you all the way. But if you are going to just use this grouping as another version of the ratbag left, then you will do nothing other than just create one more meaningless structure which someone such as myself will have nothing to do with. Your presentation was not neutral. You are without any doubt a person of the left. But you will only succeed if what you do really is neutral between all of the various groups that find neo-classical economics wrong in important respects. Economics, however, is not an easy subject that someone without formal training can choose amongst theoretical perspectives without serious study. If this is just one more anti-capitalist rant, then you can forget it. You cannot “democratise” the study of economics as some kind of all-in enterprise where everyone’s opinion counts for one and no one’s counts for more than one. But if you are genuinely interested in broadening the perspectives students receive, then, but only then, will you have the support of those of us from a more market-oriented perspective.

Unfortunately, Robert Conquest’s second law of politics seems destined to be repeated: “Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. Given what I saw today, it will be sooner rather than later but I shall continue coming along at least for a while.

But let me stress this. The Australians who have done the organisation here are trying to make this work as it is intended to work. I was specifically invited and while only belatedly asked to bring along others, the invitation was sincere. If there is a proper spirit of inquiry – very rare but not unknown – then this could be a useful and interesting forum. There is never any doubt that those of a leftist persuasion will turn out. More difficult will be to find those of a free-market bent. Everyone who comes along does, of course, have their own agenda. But sometimes, as might be possible in this case, the mutual agendas will be reinforcing where each of us can get something of interest. And anyway, I like talking to others about economics and listening to what they have to say.

Which brings me to the lunch that followed the seminar. There I discovered one more reason to study the history of economic thought, one that had not occurred to me before. In studying HET, what you have to be able to do is make logical sense of what someone else has said. You have to be able to understand another person’s argument and make it coherent. You are not, of course, asked to accept this other argument but you have to be able to see why someone else might have thought it was true, and the circumstances that allowed them to think it is true. I don’t say it is easy but I do say it is a valuable skill. It is the academic equivalent to foreign travel. Some people go to other countries and learn not a thing other than how weird other people are and come back unchanged. And then some people go to other countries and find out how others live so that they can learn something about themselves by learning about these different cultures.