Here at ALPS, we’re pretty open to new ideas, to questioning the assorted received wisdoms of the world.
So it’s always good to find examples from outside political science, not only because many of the things we talk about aren’t disciplinary, but also because it’s just stupid to think we have all the answers.
As a case in point, we might look to our little brothers over in economics. Over the past decade, they’ve taken a real battering because they seem to have utterly failed to model the world in any useful fashion.
A recent piece in The Economist pointed out, the most basic models that students get taught are often only caveated much further down the (academic) line, often after the point that many students get to. This leads to conventionalities in public discourse – trade as always positive-sum, for example – that simply don’t reflect the evidence or the state of the discipline.
In the febrile era since the great recession, students and faculty themselves have sought to throw out the approach taken to date and to build a new format.
That started with protests-cum-movements like the Manchester Post-Crash Economics Society, but has since matured into the CORE project.
CORE is a collective of faculty from various institutions, who have built a very extensive e-textbook, grounded in a fundamental different way of teaching economics. The challenges and issues are fore-grounded, rather than back-loaded, and there is a effort to invite discussion and debate, instead of presenting a fait accompli of theory.
As someone who never had any economics education at all, I’m really enjoying starting to explore this resource, which is meant for use by a wide range of users and is intended to be integrated into local teaching delivery. I’d really encourage to have a wander around the site too.
Part of me would, of course, like to just say “welcome: what took you so long”: political science has long accepted that there is contingency and conflict of interpretation of the world and has frequently used critical questions as a way into building an understanding.
But at the same time, it is refreshing to see how there is a project to re-examine so much of what makes economics the discipline that it has become. By contrast, political science has usually just stopped at the point of saying that there are many ways to skin the proverbial cat, rather than trying to bring those ways together. As the quantitative shift continues to work its way through the community, there is a risk that such diversity is attenuated or stifled.
I’m always in favour of heterodox positions: the perils of group-think and conventionality are well-understood out on our side of the social sciences, especially in a era of ‘outsider’ politics. But even I wonder whether and how we might ever produce an equivalent piece of work as CORE, just as I wonder what might have had to happen for us to want or do to produce it.