Last modified: 2018-06-20
Abstract
Advocacy of methodological pluralism arose from recognizing the absence of a single conclusive final methodological or epistemological principle suited to economics, as was openly admitted, for instance, by two of its prominent advocates such as Bruce Caldwell and Warren Samuels (cf. Salanti and Screpanti, 1997, pp.100 and 67 respectively). The persistence of heterodox approaches within the discipline may be regarded, among other things, as one of the consequences of the same situation. However, advocacy of pluralism by many heterodox economists appears to be somewhat instrumental, as emphasised, for example, by John Davis (cf. Salanti and Screpanti, 1997, p. 209).
More recently, the emergence within the mainstream of an assortment of new research programmes (usually identified as classical game theory, evolutionary game theory, behavioural game theory, evolutionary economics, behavioural economics, experimental economics, neuroeconomics, etc.) having in common the adoption of research methodologies extraneous to the tradition of neoclassical economics, has been interpreted as the sign of an emergent “mainstream pluralism” (cp, for instance, Cedrini and Fontana 2017, Colander et al. 2004, Davis 2006).
However, in comparison with traditional approaches the recent literature in these “new” subfields as well as in the “old” ones exhibits at least two remarkable novelties: 1) an unequivocal (more often implicit than otherwise) reliance on the appropriateness of partial equilibrium analysis, and 2) a comparatively intensified engagement in applied economics.
Scope of this paper is to argue that any appraisal of the so called “mainstream pluralism” ought not to disregard the consequences of these two emerging traits.
The legitimacy of partial equilibrium analysis traditionally aimed at singling out the logically admissible accounts of empirical situations to which it could be applied and those to which it could not. In this respect the problem is to understand of which use such very strict conditions (of one kind or another) can be. Indeed, it is even too easy to observe that they are plainly impossible to be satisfied for any real existing market, and so doomed to identify nothing but “empty boxes”. My tentative suggestion in this respect is to try to rediscover the virtue of approximation.
Moreover, it is undeniable that “the twenty-first century is the age of the applied economist” (Backhouse and Cherrier 2016, 1), but my readings on these subjects makes me less optimistic about what we may expect from this turn in economic research. I could provide a lot of examples (as the few ones reported in the paper) of applied research that I find quite irrelevant in the sense that they do not add anything to what we should know even before performing such pieces of applied works. By this I mean that, if someone asked me what should be expected as a result, I would give the right answer simply relying on (economic) common sense. On this matter a good antidote could be an albeit partial recovery of a priori reasoning in economics.
References
Backhouse, Roger E. and Béatrice Cherrier. 2016. “The age of the applied economist. The transformation of economics since the 1970s.” (Available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2868144)
Cedrini, Mario and Magda Fontana 2017. “Just another niche in the wall? How specialization is changing the face of mainstream economics.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 41: 1-25.
Colander, David, Richard Holt and Barkley Rosser Jr.2004. “The changing face of mainstream economics.” Review of Political Economy 16(4): 485-499.
Davis, John B. 2006. “The turn in economics: neoclassical dominance to mainstream pluralism?” Journal of Institutional Economics 2(1): 1–20
Salanti, Andrea and Ernesto Screpanti (eds.) 1997. Pluralism in Economics: New Perspectives in History and Methodology. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.