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Preface
- University of Michigan Press
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Preface This book was initially conceived by Ric, who cornered Dave and Barkley at a Post Keynesian conference and told them of an idea he had for a book. The idea was to expand upon some of the ideas that Barkley and Dave had put forward on the PKT-NET, of which Ric is moderator, in a debate about the importance of new work being done within the mainstream. Barkley had strongly argued that Post Keynesians needed to take seriously the new complexity work and that it was not more of the same “mainstream” drivel , which many on the PKT-NET saw it as being. Dave agreed with Barkley, but that wasn’t surprising since he was seen by many on the PKT-NET as “one of them mainstream guys.” Based on that interchange and previous discussions, Ric suggested that the three of us do a book that would convey to heterodox economists the exciting work that was being done in the mainstream, as well as to let the mainstream know that many heterodox economists were concerned about the same issues. The initial idea was kneaded and reworked again and again. The conception of the book vacillated chaotically as we argued out the main points of what we believed and how we believed heterodox economics interfaced with mainstream economics. The introduction went through revision after revision. There were almost weekly debates among us, with the introduction going from one to the other, and back to the ‹rst, and each time being changed to re›ect the views of the last person who had it. But ultimately the process converged, and the three of us remain friends. Much of the debate concerned what was meant by heterodox, orthodox , and mainstream, with each of us considering ourselves to be on the edges of these categories, but our perceptions of ourselves differed. Dave saw himself as mainstream, whereas Barkley and Ric saw themselves as heterodox, even though all our views were almost identical. In one of those discussions Dave told Barkley that Barkley was no heterodox economist, as he had always pictured himself, but instead just another mainstream economist. The reason why Barkley ‹tted into mainstream economics wasn’t that he agreed with a neoclassical orthodoxy—he was rather disdainful of that—but because the arguments he was making were ones that the mainstream was willing to engage, both because his book on chaos theory had established him as a legitimate modeler and an economist to be taken seriously and because the arguments that he was making ‹t nicely into a broader conception of mainstream that Dave argued was the real mainstream. The three of us continued to argue and to explore what we meant by mainstream, orthodox, and heterodox, and how one distinguishes them, and that exploration ‹nally gelled into an introduction to the volume. In it we argue that the old neoclassical orthodoxy, which we describe as an approach based on a holy trinity of rationality, greed, and equilibrium, is in the process of being replaced with a new orthodoxy , which can be described as an approach based on a holy trinity of purposeful behavior, enlightened self-interest, and sustainability. This movement to this new trinity is broadening the mainstream enormously and making it inclusive of a much wider range of economists —economists who are not neoclassical but who are still mainstream . The Evolution of the Book Having clari‹ed our thinking, we next had to choose what we were going to write in the book. Ultimately we decided that the most interesting book would be a set of interviews that showed the issues in particular case studies. It would be economists telling their story ‹rsthand, rather than us telling a secondhand story. After much discussion and debate we chose a list of interviewees who were working within this broader mainstream, who were pushing the edges of theory , and who were geographically possible to interview. There were many we could have chosen, and the debate about whom to include was heated. Ultimately we chose a set of interviewees who we felt were representative of the many dimensions on the edge of economics and who also had interesting stories to tell. preface viii [3.85.167.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:42 GMT) The initial conception we had of the book was that it would show heterodox economists the exciting work that was being done within the mainstream and the mainstream the exciting work within the heterodox camps, but the...