Over at the Soros-funded Institute for New Economic Thinking, there have recently been a few blog-posts about the potential of, and the need for, economics curriculum reform. In a recent example, Abdul Alassad characterises the problem as follows:

rational debates of ideas has been replaced by dogma, to the detriment of society. A dogma is a set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. Today, economics is taught as a set of assumptions that are unquestionably infallible, static, and undeniably true.

This misses the mark. Very few trained economists think that the dominant economic models are universal or incontrovertible. Rather, the danger of current economic teaching lies in the presentation of single models as the baseline for the analysis of economic problems, within a broader framework that relies on a single mode of economic analysis (the neoclassical synthesis). The result is that those whose exposure to economic concepts is limited to undergrad teaching come away with an attitude to the heterodoxy equivalent to the grade-schooler belief that there’s no such thing as negative numbers. Until you teach them how to manipulate unfamiliar ideas, questions that depend on those concepts will seem nonsensical.

So what’s the alternative? The failure of neoclassical models to predict or prevent the financial crisis, and its complicity in unavoidable perpetuation of inequalities under thirty years of neoliberalism could be used as an argument for simply replacing the dominant paradigm with another. The push for a more historical approach to economics provides a different, and likely more fruitful, answer: teach the controversy. It’s not clear why undergrads shouldn’t be exposed to the incompatible models of the Keynesians and the monetarists, marginalists and institutionalists, Marx and Hayek, Friedman and Coase.  For that matter, why shouldn’t they spend more time engaging with hard questions about the relationship between economic variables and real-world social practice, à la David Graeber or Thomas Piketty?

Of course, undergrads exposed to a variety of models, with often conflicting opinions about how policy will effect outcomes, and to theoretical texts that raise questions about the true nature of economic practice may end up somewhat confused about how the real world works. But this is exactly as it should be: if the last ten years have taught us anything, it’s that the world needs fewer, not more people convinced that they know how to organize an economy.