Crossing the Mainstream

By offering alternative methods of analysis and by tackling ethical issues and unanswered methodological questions in their field, the contributors to this volume "cross the mainstream" of neoclassical economics to challenge the status quo of the discipline. The result is a perspective that yields a richer and more productive understanding of economics than is rendered by traditional approaches. In the first section, the essays breach the artificial wall that some economists erect to separate economic from noneconomic phenomena. The authors incorporate ethical issues in their differing analyses of development, growth, globalization, consumption, and public policy. Their topics include the interrelation of economic growth and income distribution; the costs of globalization for developing countries; the ethical conundrum of trying to translate increased consumption into increased happiness in an affluent economy; and the implications of various proposals for Social Security reform. In section two, the contributors examine the history of economics and contemporary practice.
Among the topics they explore are the habits of thinking which have generated the current economic orthodoxy; the tension between foundationalism and relativism, with a new way to resolve the conflict from the perspective of evolutionary epistemology; and the role of the National Science Foundation in creating an "economics cartel."