Reintroducing Macroeconomics: A Critical Approach

Citation

Stretton, H. (2007), "Reintroducing Macroeconomics: A Critical Approach", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 34 No. 7, pp. 502-503. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068290710760263

Steven Cohn calls neoclassical economics “orthodox” because so many textbooks and teachers offer their students one or another version of it. To it he opposes “heterodox” economics, sometimes as a coherent alternative to the orthodoxy but more often as a collective term for a wide range of analyses of particular economic subjects, all of which include some dissent from the orthodox neglect or misunderstanding of those subjects.

Cohn's account of macroeconomics is both combative and encyclopaedic. His concluding chapter lists and recommends three or four heterodox books on each of political economy, radical economics, institutionalist economics, feminist economics, post‐keynesian economics, marxist economics, ecological economics and social economics. Until you read them it may not always be clear how far they explore different economic activities, or offer different causal explanations and value judgments of similar activities, or focus more on the economists' methods of inquiry and explanation than on the actual economic life they describe.

That list is followed by another, of more advanced books. Four are direct attacks on leading neoclassical textbooks. Six others come from the outstandingly intelligent Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts College in Massachusetts. Its associates have summarized several hundred book chapters and journal articles in A Survey of Ecological Economics (1995), The Consumer Society (1997), Human Well‐Being and Economic Goals (1997), The Changing Nature of Work (1988), The Political Economy of Inequality (2000) and A Survey of Sustainable Development: Social and Economic Dimensions (2001).

The short final chapter of Cohn's book (before 50 fifty pages of glossary, works cited and notes) might well be the best introduction to it. He summarizes his heterodox purposes and proposals surprisingly simply and clearly, considering how complicated some of the argument has been along the way. He acknowledges the respectable ambition of orthodox teachers who make their account of economic activity as factual, measurable and understandable as they can, for their students' sake. “The textbooks' subtext is that markets usually produce optimum outcomes.” Success means “maximizing economic efficiency and economic growth. Besides maximizing consumer satisfaction by maximizing consumer purchasing power, economic growth is expected to eliminate poverty, take the sting out of inequality, solve the population problem, provide the resources necessary to protect the environment, and provide the social basis for democracy and world peace.” What distinguishes Cohn's account of the orthodox thinkers is his respect for the good intentions of most of them. They are honestly, understandably mistaken. They are not all conspiring to punish the unemployed, further enrich the already‐rich and frustrate democratic government, though those may well be among the unintended effects of their thought and teaching.

Cohn also acknowledges some heterodox imperfections. The result is a complicated but good‐tempered book. But it is hard to decide what its best textbook use might be. High‐school and undergraduate students might enjoy its lively attack on old‐established orthodoxy – but they may find the heterodox complexity and uncertainties that replace it harder to learn and put into practice than the straightforward old value‐free, strictly factual “science” used to be.

There are intrinsic sources of moral and political disagreement in the cause‐and‐effect analysis of most human social behavior. Cohn is an admirable critic of the neoclassical economic science itself as well as its likely political and social influence. Nevertheless, for many students his book's positive message might go better if it were not so often interrupted by such elaborate‐criticism of the orthodox alternative. But if such lucky students could have teachers who knew from the other half of this present book how to defend their work by savaging its likeliest critics – and even converting some of them – that might be best of all.