Interfaces in Economic and Social Analysis.

• Author: Samuels, Warren J.

Glenn Johnson, the agricultural economist, argues that economists engage in three kinds of research: disciplinary, subject-matter, and problem solving. Disciplinary work has the highest status and is generally undertaken within a particular paradigm, predominantly neoclassical economics--answering only the questions which that paradigm permits and only on its terms.

This book is concerned with the question of how to deal with factors deemed exogenous to neoclassical economics. The need for the question turns on both the relatively narrow definition of the scope of economics maintained by neoclassicism, and therefore the story it tells, and the school's hegemonic position and extravagant or exclusivist claims. Various authors critique the neoclassical agenda, raising serious questions as to the probative value of neoclassical theories, such as public choice theory and law and economics, relative to theories which arise from outside economics. The strategic issue is how to deal with variables and problems not treated, or not well treated by neoclassicism, or about which a particularly narrow, a priori, and stylized story is told by it. The critical issue, then, is the status of economics imperialism--to wit: the application of neoclassical modes of reasoning to hitherto "noneconomic" topics. The pervasive tension is between those who seek to extend neoclassicism by creating ways in which hitherto exogenous variables can be brought within its ambit, constituting an extension of the disciplinary approach; and those who are more interested in subject-matter and problem solving research, and who seek to bring to bear thereon insights from all relevant disciplines, and all schools of economics, and not necessarily on terms dictated by neoclassicism.

The collection emanates from Ulf Himmelstrand's Project IDEA, for Interdisciplinary Dimensions of Economic Analysis. Its design has three steps. The first is to identify the exogenous factors in economic theory, pursued in essays by Samuel Hollander on classical economics, Ernest Mandel on Marxist analysis, Keith Hartley on neoclassical microeconomics, and Arjo Klamer on neoclassical macroeconomics. The second is to explore the richness of alternative approaches within economics, with essays by Samuel Bowles on...