New Economics as Mainstream Economics

The Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics has organised a conference in January 2010 - details available here.


New thinking in economics is an interdisciplinary approach to economic problems that acknowledges and respects the insights and analysis from other disciplines, especially those from ethics, history and engineering as well as complexity and evolutionary theory. Four issues can be highlighted, each of which has been either ignored by traditional economic modelling of the problem or treated in a misleading way that discounts the insights from heterodox economics and other disciplines.

1. The economy is a complex, non-linear dynamic system with technological change inherent in economic growth. Many economic policy issues are potentially non-marginal changes to the system in the context of strong uncertainty.
2. Many issues of economic policy (traditionally called “welfare economics”) are primarily ethical-economics in nature, and should be informed by moral philosophy rather than economics in isolation. Traditional economic models adopt an extreme form of utilitarianism, with a questionable choice and use of discount rates, ignoring the philosophical literature and the concept of justice.
3. Engineering and history inform economics through studies of the production processes involving the supply and demand of materials, energy, skills and entrepreneurship. Economic history is critical in understanding the relationship between economics and technological change because the technologies evolve in response to economic conditions, e.g. carbon-price signals. Traditional models assume continuity and path independence.
4. The politics of mitigation implies unstable alliances and trade-offs between governments and political parties. By the use of the social welfare function (required for the calculus), traditional economists simplify social choices and pre-empt political negotiation, claiming an optimality for their subjective assumptions and market interpretations

What I appreciate best are the principles governing the work in the Trust:

(a) that economic behaviour is primarily social rather than individual;
(b) that economic behaviour is influenced by aesthetic and ethical values as well as economic values: and
(c) that the pursuit of self-interest in economic behaviour can impact adversely on both society and the environment.

Looking forward to reading more of their work.