This summer I attended a behavioural science school at the University of Warwick. Among the speakers was the economist Paul Frijtas, who said something that sparked my attention:

“Individually economic ideas can be fantastically idiotic, but as a whole they provide the bureaucracy with a framework for thinking about the right things, communicating and looking at the data.”

This is quite a disarming rejoinder for us critics of mainstream economics, in that it already concedes most of the substantive points we might make about unrealistic assumptions, limited methodology and empirical issues (many of which Frijtas himself did not shy away from making for the duration of the School). Instead it throws up a different challenge: are any of our alternatives feasible, practical and comprehensive enough to provide a general framework for thinking about economic problems?

We may call for adopting a variety of perspectives – pluralism – but I am increasingly of the view that none of them can suffice in this regard.

Pluralism as a check

Any call for utilising pluralist economics needs to be clear on exactly how it would be put into action. Like it or not, the mainstream has a wide range of tools ready for use in situations: from business cycle management to competition regulation; from environmental protection to health policy; and for estimating the effects of both early education and criminal rehabilitation programs. Although there are many schools of economics which would ideally be incorporated into the pluralist’s toolkit, none of them are sophisticated enough to replace mainstream economics entirely. Schools such as feminist, behavioural and ecological economics are non-starters because they are designed to highlight specific (and important) features of the world which the mainstream has historically missed, rather than to present a full alternative vision of economics.

There are several approaches which are more general, including the well-established schools of Austrian, Marxist, and post-Keynesian economics. But it would be difficult to persuade institutions which utilise economics to embrace the former two for the simple reason that they usually object to the existence of these institutions altogether. Many Austrians would like to get rid of all governmental functions but the ones that facilitate basic market operations, which is not helpful for an economist working in the Government Economic Service (GES) or Bank of England (BoE). Marxists would go one step further and do away with the market operations as well, making it difficult for a private or public sector economist to whole-heartedly embrace the use of Marxist economics.

Post-Keynesians offer a sometimes appealing, non-burn-it-all-down vision of capitalism, but they are often focused on macroeconomics and are at best ambivalent about many of the microeconomic policy tools of the mainstream such as cost-benefit analysis, econometrics and auction theory, all of which are easily actionable for practitioners. The lack of workable alternatives outside macroeconomics makes it difficult to see what a ‘post-Keynesian GES/BoE’ would look like. At the other end of the spectrum, Agent Based Computational Economics (ACE) – which I wrote about recently – offers a variety of flexible simulations which could in principle be applied to nay problem. But this approach is arguably too flexible at this stage, such that there is not a standard framework from which analysis can be benchmarked and compared across problems.

So what is the role of pluralism? Increasingly I believe that it should function as a much-needed check on the mainstream, since if economic ideas can be “fantastically idiotic” then it goes without saying there are things they can miss. As the Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas put it “the construction of theoretical models…necessarily involves ignoring some evidence or alternative theories… [sometimes]… I simply fail to see some of the data or some alternative theory”. Pluralism can make the mainstream more aware of these blind spots.

If you think that to cast pluralism as a mere check on the mainstream is to diminish its role, you are mistaken. Highlighting problems the mainstream cannot see and proposing an alternative framework where necessary is hugely valuable, both intellectually and from a policy perspective. Feminist economics, for example, would highlight issues such as the gendered impact of recessions, or of infrastructure investment in developing countries. They would also suggest counting household and care work in GDP, which can drastically alter its level, growth of and volatility (up, down and down respectively, in case you’re wondering).

Ecological economics would force economists to look at the impact of economic activity on the environment, questioning whether growth represented true ‘progress’ or whether it was just borrowed by depleting natural resources and destabilising ecosystems . As with feminist economics, a revealing way of doing this is to incorporate ecological concerns into GDP estimates.  And just as governments across the world have recognised that behavioural economics helps to simplify a vast range of government policies based on insights about how humans actually make decisions, the GES have recently recognised such ecological considerations in their Green Book.

However, we have a long way to go before pluralism is part and parcel of the economists’ toolkit, and this can have deleterious social consequences. Around a decade before he was appointed Chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke dismissed the post-Keynesian Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis – which posited that investors can become overconfident, getting sucked into speculative bubbles and ultimately crashing the economy – on the grounds that “the best course of action is pushing the rationality postulate as far as it will go”. Needless to say, this faith in the self-regulating power of financial markets was widespread among economists, policymakers and politicians in the run up to the crash.

Subsequently, the mainstream is trying to incorporate Minsky into its models, but the presence of post-Keynesians on monetary policy committees, in financial regulation authorities and as talking heads on the media would have been more helpful in the run up to the crash – which is why the phrase ‘too little, too late’ springs to mind. Who knows what other insights we have missed, or are currently missing due to the intellectual straightjacket placed on understanding and policymaking by the mainstream? To return to my above examples, Marxists might have voiced concerns about falling rates of profit and declining investment in the 2000s, while Austrians would have taken a step back to ask policymakers whether intervention, particularly in the form of low interest rates, could actually improve the situation at all.

Checks, checks and more checks

Of course, in a discipline as broad and socially impactful as economics, pluralism of economic ideas will not be enough. An obvious extension that is needed is interdisciplinarity: as this New York Times column pointed out, some knowledge of sociology – in particular the fact that work is not just a source of income but of identity and self-worth – might have helped economists to notice the problems emerging in former manufacturing hubs in the United States, seeing and speaking to them as individuals rather than as simple ‘costs’ in models of trade. No doubt similar insights could be gleaned from psychologists, anthropologists, geographers, philosophers and even humanities scholars if they had more of a seat at the policymaking table.

Any collection of experts making political decisions – no matter how diverse their expertise is – also needs to be accountable to the public. As a recent Guardian article about public economics education noted, the alienation and distrust people feel towards the economy and those they perceive to have power within it, believing that “economics is something that’s done to them, by people sitting far away in Westminster or the City”. One participant encapsulated the extent to which expertise shuts people out of democratic debate when she said “information is power…if I can learn in this class, maybe others will listen to me.”

Ensuring that experts were accountable to the people they served through public consultations and education programs would help to alleviate this sense of disconnection from economics and politics, and would likely help the experts too. The locals may not help you program your DSGE model, but they can highlight issues such as the regional economic disparities which have proven so salient since the financial crisis, a fact that dovetails nicely with the approach of sociologists and anthropologists to actually go out and speak to people. The Science Communication movement has learned a lot from this two-way, interactive model of participation, where both experts and non-experts are deemed to have valuable contributions.

A final, much-needed check on mainstream economics it the need for an ethical code akin to that of doctors. Relatively speaking, egregious ethical violations are rare in economics, but egregious violations needn’t be rare to be harmful, as some economists’ connections to the financial sector during the financial crisis showed. An ethical code combined with professional sanctions would prevent and punish such violations to the benefit of both society and of those economists (i.e. the vast majority of them) who have done nothing wrong.

Yet there is also a more general problem with ethics in economics: the embedded tendency to recommend policies based on purely ‘technical’ criteria without recourse to ethical considerations, something which only make sense if you consider the normative propositions of mainstream economics ethically neutral. Yet growth, efficiency and ‘Pareto optimality’ are no less politically contestable than economic freedom, well-being and security, even though the former are the focal points of most economic models. Sheila Dow has outlined a vision for ethics which tries to take a more pluralist view, outlining the professional duty of a discipline which has a large degree of socio-economic power.

From here to there

Ideally all or most of these checks would take place in the same person’s head, aided by a fully reformed economics education which encompassed pluralism, ethics, interdisciplinarity and communication. However, this is still a long way off, and in any case it is admittedly a little much to ask every economist and expert to be constantly aware of all of these issues in every decision they take. Thus, the inclusion of individuals, guidelines and consultation processes which involve people with different perspectives and create accountability mechanisms would be a valuable first step to pushing economics back in the right direction whenever it became too fantastically idiotic.

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In his excellent book ‘Economics Rules’, Dani Rodrik outlined what he saw as “the rights and wrongs of the dismal science”. One of his key refrains was that the problem was “economists, not economics”: that is, some economists mistook their models for the real world and applied them inappropriately, abusing a potentially useful set of tools. All too often the consequence was ideology masquerading as science, resulting in economic failures such as quantity-targeting monetarism in the 1980s; the 1990s Russian privatisation; and recently the 2008 financial crisis. According to Rodrik, good economics is about making sure you have picked the right model for the right job, basing your decision on sound theory and evidence. Any economist worth their salt should be pragmatic, not dogmatic.

Rodrik is not wrong that there are some economists who are prone to misusing their models, in some cases to an alarming degree. Neither is he wrong about what good economics should entail: intellectual flexibility and a grasp of a wide range of tools for understanding the economy. Despite this, I cannot agree with the general idea that the framework of economics is not the problem with the discipline, and that if this framework were only taught and practiced better many of the discipline’s problems would be overcome. In fact, I believe modern economics is characterised by the exact opposite problem: reliance on a single framework is hamstringing the research of capable, conscientious and (to a degree) critical economists. In other words, the problem is economics, not economists.

The bad economics Rodrik highlights should be resisted for sure, but it largely a vestige of the past and does not represent the current direction of the discipline. This is what causes researchers who better represent contemporary economics to become exasperated in response to the myriad of articles criticising the discipline as if it consists solely of free-market ideologues who cling to models of perfect markets. Two Manchester colleagues of mine, Rachel Griffiths and Diane Coyle, have been involved in this debate recently, and the hashtag #whateconomistsreallydo illustrates the frustration and perplexity many of these researchers share at criticisms of the discipline.

In a recent article for Prospect Magazine, Coyle counters a critique by Howard Reed by rattling off several contemporary examples where she believes economists are doing relevant, empirical work that has nothing to do with incubating financial crashes. Among these are papers looking at the benefits of railroads in 19^th century India; the effect of modern technological change on jobs; and the effect of sugar taxes on obesity rates in the UK. These examples should be enough to convince people that a lot of modern economic research is going in the right direction.

But in my opinion the issue is not so much what economists do as how they do it. Critical thinking exists within the discipline but this criticism remains solely within the bounds of the mainstream. For a long time now ‘economics’ has been synonymous with a specific methodology, the use of which is considered interesting in itself regardless of whether it uncovers anything new.

Relevant, interesting – and unnecessary

At the Royal Economic Society (RES) conference this year, Botond Koszegi gave one of the keynote lectures, ‘A Pro-Market Case for Regulation’. Koszegi is a prominent researcher in prospect theory – which happens to be where my research interests lie – and along with his co-author Matthew Rabin is a likely candidate for a future Nobel Prize. The nub of his presentation was a model in which consumers, due to cognitive limitations, were unable to fully examine every single product they purchased. The result was that regulations guaranteeing a certain standard of safety, quality and the like could improve competition by giving people more time to shop around instead of having to devote so much time to investigate specific products. Thus, regulation would improve markets and competition.

I cannot fault Koszegi’s presentation, which was lucid and engaging. I also cannot fault his technical skills, which certainly surpass mine (a low bar, admittedly). I cannot fault the subject matter of his presentation, which was relevant and interesting. Nor can I fault the certain kind of creativity required to put these insights into an economic model. But then, that’s just it: to get an audience among economists, these insights had to be put into an economic model. Incorporating ideas into these frameworks is a necessary condition for their acceptance, something which stifles the production of knowledge.

Like them or not, the points highlighted by Koszegi were not especially novel. Koszegi himself argued that his framework rationalised existing policy by UK, EU and US regulators, rather than proposing a bold new direction. A quick search uncovered a 2011 UK government document on regulation – produced a good while before Koszegi’s research – which stated that “If consumers do not have sufficient information, or find it difficult to make informed decisions, firms face less competitive pressure”. Institutional economists such as Jamie Galbraith have claimed for a long time that markets function best when “the product is what it claims to be, and that it will function as it is supposed to do. This is what a strong system of regulation provides”. Clearly, we did not need a complicated theoretical model to make this point.

The dynamic of using standard economic methods to say something which is in some sense already known is quite common. One largely glowing article about last year’s RES conference published in the Independent came close to realising this when it said that “there is one [paper] that shows that married women are tidier than married men and do more housework after they get married. I think many people will be unsurprised by that, but it is good to have it established.” I can’t help but feel that this point was “established” long before economists turned their gaze toward it, and despair at the wasted intellectual capital from “establishing” it when there are far more pressing questions in the world.

As the old saying goes, “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Economists have two main hammers: choice models and variants thereof form the basis of most theoretical models (I include behavioural economics in this, which still uses the utility maximising framework). Linear regression is economists’ preferred empirical technique (again, commonly used variants such as panel methods or instrumental variables are still fundamentally linear). Research incentives typically mean adhering to at least one of these two techniques, despite the plethora of other techniques available. The aforementioned ‘institutional’ school of economics might prefer a theoretical lens which looks at social and legal structures over individual choice, and an empirical method which focuses on qualitative details over statistical techniques. This is just one of the many alternative methods available to economists.

Mainstream economic papers often deal with what seem like exciting questions, but give ultimately disappointing answers because they follow the same old methods. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been lured into an economics presentation by a promising title only to be frustrated with the actual content. At Manchester last year there was a presentation with the scintillating title “Networks in Conflict: Theory and Evidence from the Great War of Africa”, which I enthusiastically attended. Many others clearly felt the same since the room was completely packed out, including undergraduates (who don’t usually go to these seminars).

But as the presentation began it became apparent that they were going to approach the issue using…dum dum dum… a rational choice model, followed by some linear regression! I felt that the war in the Congo was as good a candidate as any for something that was neither rational nor linear, but these underlying assumptions were not even discussed in the presentation or in the paper, which has since been published in a top journal. This could be forgiven if the paper contained revelations about the war in the Congo, but actually its key conclusion verged on trivial: the more your enemies fight, the more you have to fight; the more your friends fight, the less you have to fight. Besides being underwhelmed by this, I was surprised a paper on networks didn’t utilise Granovetter’s network analysis, arguably one of the most famous tools in sociology.

The question is not whether rational choice and linear regression can be useful; anyone who believes they cannot is talking nonsense, as some of Coyle’s examples illustrate. The question is whether they are always useful, which would also be nonsense, but is something you could be forgiven for thinking economists believe when following economic research. The rational choice model has had quite a few successes, including in matching kidney donors to one another, but it has at least as many failures, most of which are so well-worn at this point that it’s not worth going over them again. Linear regression is likely to be the right statistical model most of the time, but this still cannot be assumed a priori. Coyle rightly highlights two recent papers, one by Alwyn Young and one by John Ioannidis, which have cast serious doubts on widely used econometric practice and they are far from the first to do so.

Economists may respond that modelling and empirical estimation allows them to isolate and quantify formerly nebulous mechanisms to make the exact trade-offs of policies clear. However, I suspect that in many cases this is a spurious kind of precision, since estimated coefficients and modelling parameters are notoriously unstable. Out of sample predictions are not made habitually in economics, and when they are they have a mixed track record, to put it mildly. Furthermore, the choice of model will affect the conclusions, both by determining what to model and by modelling it in a certain way. As both Coyle and Reed agree, this makes value judgments implicit in economic models, but many economists are insufficiently aware of this point and tend to see standard models and regression as the default framework.

The other defence is a practical one: sure, these methods have their flaws, but they are the best way to convince policymakers, politicians and the public that a policy has a quasi-scientific justification. While this may be true given our current state of affairs, there is a circularity to it. Part of the reason that this kind of research is deemed necessary is because of the influence of economists in government and society over the past 80 or so years. By embracing a wider variety of approaches to knowledge, economists could use their considerable influence to alter the perceptions of those in power instead of reinforcing the reliance on a single framework.

It’s monolithic all the way down

The uncritical acceptance of one methodology begins with undergraduate economics education. Rethinking Economics conducted a curriculum review of 174 modules at 7 Russell Group universities – rightly or wrongly considered the ‘top’ universities in the UK – and we found that the uncritical acceptance of one type of economics begins with education. Under 10% of modules even mentioned anything other than mainstream or ‘neoclassical’ economics; in econometrics, over 90% of modules devoted more than two-thirds of their lectures to linear regression. Only 24% of exam questions required critical or independent thinking (i.e. were open-ended); this dropped to 8% if you only counted the compulsory macro and micro modules that form the core of economics education.

We have previously called this ‘indoctrination’, and while this may seem dramatic the dictionary definition of indoctrination is to “teach a person or set of people to accept a set of beliefs uncritically”, which we think adequately characterises the results of the review, as well as our own experience and many widely used economics textbooks. Given this education, it is no wonder that economists remain wedded to the fundamental precepts of choice models and linear regression no matter where they turn their attention. By putting the method first, the implicit assumption becomes that answering a question using this framework is prima facie interesting, and critical evaluation of these tools against others is made unthinkable.

This debate may seem too abstract to warrant such extended public discussion, but economics exerts more influence over government, the private sector and the media than any other social science – perhaps than any other discipline altogether. And the intellectual monopoly outlined above makes itself known through this influence, which limits our perceived political choices. Economic debates, including the one surrounding the recent Brexit vote, are frequently conducted in terms of aggregate GDP, which despite some criticism remains the standard measure of economic success both among economists and the public, even though it ignores (among other things) regional disparities in the UK and therefore does not speak to many peoples’ lived experience. This is perhaps one reason why the ubiquitous forecasts of a loss to GDP from Brexit failed to persuade the country.

One, more concrete example of the influence of economic ideas is the Green Book, a document produced by the UK Government that sets out the framework for the appraisal and evaluation of all policies, programmes and projects. It is remarkable how much this book reads like a first-year economics textbook in places: like a standard textbook, it focuses largely on economic efficiency while also acknowledging equity (distributional) considerations. It then spends much time discussing how to place economic values on the costs and benefits of policies to weigh them up. Other economic objectives such as security, stability, or economic freedom are not given much (if any) attention; other decision-making criteria (especially more democratic ones) are similarly absent.

Rethinking Economics believe that the curriculum needs to embrace a wider diversity of views, as well as focusing more on the real world and less on derivation of abstract models. But even in this debate the poverty of imagination resurfaces: when we call for the curriculum to teach us about issues such as the financial crisis, inequality and immigration, we are frequently met with the rebuttal that the relevant models are too complex for undergraduate education or would take too long to teach. Once again the assumption is that mainstream economic models are the starting point, when it is perfectly possible – desirable, even – to learn about issues such as the financial crisis without using any type of model. Models may help you to understand it at a higher level, but this should be built on top of a strong real-world foundation. Putting the real world first would mean that future business leaders, policymakers and academic economists would not enter the world believing that ‘economics’ is synonymous with one type of approach.

I believe that Rodrik’s bad economists are not a few unfortunate renegades; they are the reductio ad absurdum of the education and research practice outlined above. When economists are only taught one approach as if it is economics, then it’s unsurprising that some take it too far. In one sense what’s remarkable is how far contemporary economists have been willing and able to stretch the core framework to accommodate more relevant insights, working with such a limited set of tools. Despite this, areas of the discipline risk finding themselves in a bit of an intellectual dead end by putting their method first and using it to say things which are new and interesting only to economists.

Rethinking Economics and the wider student movement to reform economics believe that ‘critical pluralism’ is the antidote to this problem. If future economists are taught about relevant issues, using a wide range of models where necessary but not insisting upon them, less effort will be devoted to extending particular methods to trivial or long-answered questions. In policy and in the public arena, economics will give us a better conception of how the world works, and a broader array of political choices for making it a better place. Students will not only have a better understanding of why standard economic tools may fail; they will have a better understanding of when and why they are successful. Critical thinking will be embedded from the start of an economists’ training.

Several positive signs indicate that the discipline could go in this direction: the open-minded initiative Rebuilding Macroeconomics; a new focus on economics communication, including the fantastic session I attended at this years’ RES; the revamped CORE curriculum, which seems to be slowly becoming pluralist even if its adherent are reluctant to admit it; and initiatives from within government institutions such as the Bank of England and Government Economic Service, which are embracing pluralism. In fact, the newest version of the aforementioned Green Book, published this year, now includes an entire section on the limits of standard economic analysis when dealing with the environment and alternative approaches.

Here’s hoping that this kind of approach will be the norm for the economics of the future.

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In recent months, there has been a lively public debate between mainstream economists and its critics. Newspapers such as the Guardian have declared that economics needs a ‘reformation’, while there have been a number of response articles from mainstream economists complaining that the economics profession is misunderstood, and that it has been the victim of ‘dangerous’ and ‘ill-informed expert bashing’ for both failing to predict the 2007/8 financial crisis, and failing to take on new approaches.

The main points of contention seem to be:

1. Forecasting is very difficult
2. Most economists are not involved in forecasting or macroeconomics
3. A more pluralistic approach would dilute economists’ influence over policy makers
4. Economists are not right-wing as commonly portrayed
5. Economics has become increasingly empirical
6. Critics misinterpret the use of mathematical models
7. Economics is no longer based on simplified assumptions such as rational behaviour
8. Criticism is dangerous because it erodes the authority of experts

We believe that the critics have a point, one which many economists’ responses have failed to address. Nonetheless, the critics often get some things wrong about the discipline, which only serves to muddy the waters and put economists on the defensive. Below we will discuss each of these eight issues in turn to see what the critics have right and wrong.

1. Forecasting is very difficult

The point that forecasting is hard is obviously true, and it does play a smaller role in economics than it does in something like meteorology. However economists, and not just those who work for central banks, do regularly make forecasts which have enormous influence over policy makers, the private sector, the public – and therefore the economy. When in 2004 Alan Greenspan responded to suggestions that housing was in a bubble by saying ‘a significant decline in consumer incomes or house prices could quickly alter the outlook; nonetheless, both scenarios appear unlikely’ he was making a forecast that would have a profound effect on the subsequent course of events.

Forecasting also has a special role to play in the scientific method, as a way of falsifying theories. This is more difficult in the social sciences than in something like physics, but one reason the 2007/8 event gets so much attention is because it seemed to falsify many of the key assumptions of mainstream economics, such as the influential idea that markets are generally efficient and self-correcting, while heterodox approaches that have traditionally been marginalised did better.

The real problem though is not that mainstream economists failed to predict ‘the timing, extent and severity’ (as the London School of Economics put it) of the crisis – economists have never been held to any such standard of forecasting skill, and no one asked for an exact date. It is that they could not have predicted or warned of the crisis, even in principle, because their models didn’t allow for such events. Furthermore, the models directly contributed to the crisis by enabling the financial sector to develop increasingly risky and dangerous products.

2. Most economists are not involved in forecasting or macroeconomics

It is also true that most economists are not involved in forecasting (nor are most meteorologists). However the fact that #WhatEconomistsReallyDo involves lots of things other than warning of #MajorEconomicCatastrophes is not much comfort to the many millions of people who have been affected by such events; or to those who worry that economists are still not using the appropriate tools to model the economy.

3. A more pluralistic approach would dilute economists’ influence over policy makers

On plurality, it is often pointed out by economists that offering diverse viewpoints makes it harder for economists to shape policy. As Simon Wren-Lewis puts it, ‘The point is obvious once you make the comparison to medicine. Don’t like the idea of vaccination? Pick an expert from the anti-vaccination medical school.’

This is an interesting – but not unusual – choice of analogy, given that mainstream economists were the ones who saw no need to vaccinate the financial system against crisis. But to stay with the medical comparison, surely a bigger issue than plurality (doctors don’t always agree either) is rebuilding credibility with the public; a 2017 UK survey by YouGov asking which experts could be trusted when talking about their own areas of expertise showed that doctors were trusted by 82 percent, and economists by 25 percent. This isn’t just the fault of the media, or a public relations issue: according to Dean Baker (who presciently warned in a 2005 paper with David Rosnick that for economists to miss the US housing bubble would be an ‘act of extraordinary negligence’) the crisis cost each person in the US around $27,000 in lost earnings.

Comparing economics to a well-established science like medicine simply assumes the conclusion: that economics is a science. The all-too-common corollary comparison of heterodox thinkers to anti-vacciners – or climate-change deniers, or creationists, or all three – also points to the fact that mainstream economics, or at least the part of it with influence over policy, remains too much of a monoculture with little real interest in reinventing itself, despite numerous well-publicised initiatives to do just that. It seems that economists’ interest in the benefits of competition and new ideas breaks down rather quickly when it comes to their own field.

4. Economists are not right-wing as commonly portrayed

On politics, it is correct that economists aren’t all the free-marketeers they are so often portrayed as by the media. At the same time, one reason for this perception may be that economic models incorporate various assumptions that tend to lead to unequal and unfair outcomes. For example, mainstream economists have traditionally aimed to optimise economic growth and paid less attention to distribution, in part because their models make what amount to symmetry assumptions which don’t fit easily with things like extreme inequality. Another concern is that many influential economists have been captured by the financial industry through things like lucrative consulting contracts, one cause of ‘regulatory capture’. For instance, one study found that whenever none of a paper’s authors worked in a business school, it was ‘significantly less likely to be positive on the level of executive compensations and significantly more likely to be negative.’

5. Economics has become increasingly empirical

On the use of data, it is again true that economists have been incorporating more empirical data into their research, which is an encouraging development. However, while most economists who speak of a data-revolution lean on a 2013 paper by Daniel Hamermesh that makes this discovery, what they don’t mention is that Hamermesh himself concludes his paper cautiously, suggesting it is too soon to be confident that this development will do much to change the discipline. Besides, the real test is whether the data is being used to falsify key assumptions and modelling approaches. One data point, for example, is that the main macroeconomic models all failed during the crisis. But according to Paul Krugman, writing as part of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy’s Rebuilding Macroeconomic Theory Project, ‘Neither the financial crisis nor the Great Recession that followed required a rethinking of basic ideas.’ What then would it take?

6. Critics misinterpret the use of mathematical models

Economists claim that critics do not understand their mathematical models. However, it seems that non-economists are beginning to understand these models all too well – for example the Nobel-winning techniques used to evaluate complex derivatives, which blew up so spectacularly during the crisis. In fact, some of the most vocal critics include people with a training in mathematics or physics, who simply believe that the mathematics used by economics is inappropriate for the problem at hand.

And while it is regularly said that mathematics acts as ‘a powerful lie detector’ because it forces the economist to clarify their assumptions, the reality is that complex mathematics is often used not to clarify, but to obfuscate; something that even prominent mainstream economists – Paul Romer being a case in point – now recognise (though this will come as less of a surprise to people with a training in media than to those trained in abstract theory). One of the main criticisms of models used in everything from environmental economics to quantitative finance is that, in the wrong hands, they are easily adjusted to give whatever answer the modeller wants.

7. Economics is no longer based on simplified assumptions such as rational behaviour

A related claim from economists is that their popular critics are attacking a simplified impression of their models. Lionel Robbins for example wrote back in 1932 that if it were ‘commonly known, if it were generally realised that Economic Man is only an expository device … it is improbable that he would be such a universal bogey’ (today, economists prefer to use the term ‘straw man’). It is true that areas such as behavioural economics have grown in influence, and economists have never relied exclusively on simplifications such as rational economic man. However, these modifications generally take the form of small adjustments to existing models rather than a wholesale rethinking of the approach, something which has been left to other disciplines such as psychology.

Economists rightly criticise those who repudiate their work without reading it; curiously, though, they do not always abide by that same standard: among all the social sciences, economists are by far those least likely to read outside their discipline. One benefit of having economics discussed in the media is exactly that they can pull together ideas from different experts.

8. Criticism is dangerous because it erodes the authority of experts

Finally, there is the oft-repeated claim that criticism is ‘dangerous’ (or even ‘anti-intellectual and dangerous’ as a piece in Times Higher Education said) because it erodes public trust in experts. But how could public criticism of mainstream economics possibly be more dangerous to society than something like the complete failure of orthodox economic tools during the crisis?

To summarise, the problem we believe is not so much that economists are misunderstood by critics or by the public; it is that they have failed to adapt following the crisis, other than to come up with new ways of defending their tired paradigm. Heterodox economists and people from other disciplines, including those working in the media, have already played a useful role by contributing new ideas and advocating for alternative approaches from areas such as biology and complexity theory. But if further progress is to be made, mainstream economists and policy makers need to engage more seriously with alternative viewpoints, and realise – as many in the public and the media have already done – that the days of monoculture neoclassical economics are over.

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