Creating New Economists

I had a very interesting experience over the weekend while attending university open days. I was enquiring from a young woman encouraging people to take economics how pluralist her course was. She really seemed unable to understand my question. She responded that they taught 'normal' economics. I asked her if this meant neoclassical or whether they also had space for classical or Marxist varieties. She was simply unable to answer.

This is the problem the discipline faces: really nice, well-motivated people who have no conception that there might be other ways of thinking about economics than in terms of supply and demand curves and the marginal analysis. To address this problem the Association of Heterodox Economics is running training in alternative methods for economics, beginning with a course of training for researchers.

The postgraduate workshop on research methods will take place at London Metropolitan University on 10th and 11th February next year. It is funded so places are available free for students. Workshop topics will include:

· Reorienting economics to match method with social material

· Open system methodology in Economics

· Grounded theory in Economics

· Mixing quantitative and qualitative data

· Qualitative data analysis

To book a place you need to contact Andrew Mearman: Andrew.Mearman@uwe.ac.uk.
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The Economist as Shaman

Economists have taken a fair old beating in recent years, culminating in the unedifying spectacle of a group of them finding themselves unable to find adequate answers to their sovereign's questioning about how they justified their existence in being asleep on watch during the most serious economic crisis in a century. When the Queen raised this question at the LSE in late 2008 she was reassured by the attendant academics that they all thought they were doing the right thing.

I am sure Her Majesty is not alone in wondering what our economists are up to, and perhaps it is timely to ask a wider question about what economists are for. Given the way that academic economists have made themselves irrelevant with their self-referential number-crunching, and the professional economists have put themselves beyond the pale through their economical approach to ethics, it is understandable that the role of an economist might not be an attractive one to today's generation of young people. So I am opening up a new research project to try to pin down what might be the role of an economist in a sustainable society.

This consideration is not about what economists do in our current society; instead I want to operate more like a social anthropologist, taking a step back and considering what an economist might be for in a general sense, rather than in the sense of a capitalist society in the early 21st century. Social anthropologists have the advantage of developing an in-depth knowledge of human societies vastly different from our own. They can thus develop a sense of what is essential about the way humans live together in community, and what is just superficial.

Clearly my proposition of the economist as shaman is a provocative one, and in some sense a thought experiment. The idea came to me because of my personal experience of the peculiar social and cultural role people were requiring of me, which reminded me of propitiation and mediation. Numerous people have expressed relief when I tell them I am not a vegetarian, or expect me to forgive them for making decision to fly to Australia to visit relatives.

Just as there is 'bad medicine' in causing too much disruption to natural relationships and the balance of creatures with the planet, so the modern shaman might negotiate our way to access resources that causes the least environmental disorder. Her or his role might be to mediate our relationships with the natural world, on which we depend for our survival. As resources become scarce and conflict over food, water and land intensifies, we might need to redefine the role of the people in society whose expertise lies in the area of resource use.
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