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ABSTRACT
This article gives an appraisal of the work of David Colander. After a brief biographical summary, we look at his work in methodology and the role that institutions and ‘vision’ play in his economic analysis. A crucial part of his work in this area is viewing not only the economy but also the economic profession as an adaptive complex system. This leads us to his major contributions to macroeconomics and economic education. We conclude with an overall assessment of his contributions to economics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Colander (Citation1998a, pp. 39–55).
2 David Colander, Written Testimony, House Science and Technology Committee, 20 July 2010a, p. 1. In this regard, he might be to economics what Feynman (Citation2001) was to physics, someone willing to state uncomfortable truths that others might hold back from publicly expressing.
3 AFS Intercultural Programs (originally the American Field Service) is an international youth exchange organization. It was formed in 1915, with its headquarters in New York City.
4 Colander (Citation1998a, p. 48).
5 ‘Sociology of economics’ is to be distinguished from the much older ‘economic sociology’. The former studies the relations between groups of economists, the educational and scholarly social process in the field and the hierarchical relations between competing schools of economic thought, making this an extension of the history of economic thought. The latter is a much older approach that focuses on economic aspects of social classes and relations and ‘social causes’ of economic circumstances. This dates at least to Karl Marx and includes Thorstein Veblen and Joseph Schumpeter, as well as many more recent figures.
6 Keynes once said that economists should become like dentists, while Veblen firmly viewed economists as a type of engineer. A number of important economists of the past were originally engineers, including Pareto and Cournot, with the French connection between engineering and economics deriving from the utopian socialist Saint-Simon and his idea of social engineering. This was derided later by Hayek (Citation1988), who considered this to be the ultimate foundation of misguided socialist thinking, ‘the fatal conceit’. Colander’s view of this is somewhat different from these older views as a result of his commitment to the ‘realytic’.
7 While Colander has argued that formal methods are key to how an economist captures a vision, he has generally eschewed using specific formal methods and suggests a more eclectic approach to their use. But he has also advocated uses of formal methods associated with complexity economics like new ‘ advances in computational and analytic technology, which have made it possible to formally analyze issues that previously were too complicated to analyze’ (Colander and Kupers Citation2014, p. 4).
8 Colander believes that complexity economics provides insights into how systems self-organize and that, with advancements in computational technology, for example, we now have a new formal method that can be used to help us map out these ‘emergence’ problems.
9 The term obviously calls for a comparison with ‘Post Keynesian economics’. Colander follows the American Post Keynesians in leaving out the hyphen in the name. While Post Keynesian economics can be viewed as an extension of Keynesian economics that often seeks to go back to the work of Keynes himself and his ideas, Post Walrasian economics was specifically anti-Walrasian, critical of the Walrasian general equilibrium framework, and seeking to move beyond it. It may be that this confusion contributed to the term failing to catch on more widely in the profession.
10 The question clearly arises as to what school of economics besides that of complexity economics does David Colander belong to? In the eyes of most, he has long been associated with the Post Keynesian school due to his early work on MAP with Abba Lerner with its incomes policies advocated by many Post Keynesians, and many of his ideas are consistent with some of the various Post Keynesian sub-schools. But he has also published numerous papers with the late public choice economist Ken Koford (Colander, Koford, and Miller Citation1993) and has praised the work of the late Austrian economist, Larry Moss (Colander Citation2010b). He is arguably mainstream in having served as president of several associations and on committees of the American Economic Association, but he has long noted that he usually has served as the one questioning committees’ recommendations and has considered himself the ‘gadfly’ in these groups (Colander Citation1998b). In addition, he has criticized mainstream economics in his work on economic education and other writings (see, for instance, Colander Citation2015a). We have put him in the broader category of ‘dissenting economist’—he seems to be the voice of dissent in any group that he is part of. He regards that dissent as friendly, and part of a continual re-evaluation of itself that every group should continually do, this latter role making him the economist watcher. Many see it as less friendly, and Colander as a pain in the neck. Colander’s point, we believe, is that economics should constantly be evolving, but it can get stuck with its past sociological structure like mainstream versus heterodox, as an example, or the social hierarchies found in the profession. To break away from this, Colander believes one must have a vision of what the future of economics might be and where it should be going. He has a definite view of that future, which is that the economy is complex and our goal, as economists, should be to develop new and exciting analytical and computational tools driven by empirical methods, behavioral and experimental economics and technical tools like cluster and dimensional analysis.
11 Colander and Kupers (Citation2014, p. vii) report that they were motivated to write it after they met at a climate policy conference where policy issues were posed as being predominantly market-oriented or predominantly government regulation-oriented, with both of them finding this dichotomy to be overly simplistic in a complex world. Of course, climate models themselves have long relied on nonlinear dynamics of a complexity sort (Lorenz Citation1963).
12 At this point we note that, while Colander here and in many other places says quite a lot about how policy making should be done or approached, he rarely proposes specific policies. Probably he did this most forcefully early in his career with the MAP proposal, and it may be that the lack of response by actual policy-makers to that effort may have discouraged him and moved him to his more general frame of analysis.
13 This list is close to a set of supposed ‘top seven’ schools that does not include Columbia (Colander’s alma mater) but adds Princeton and Berkeley.
14 This issue is discussed at considerably greater length in Rosser, Holt, and Colander (Citation2010) where there is a call for European programs to pursue an independent approach that combines the best of the American ideas while retaining elements of the older national approaches, especially heterodox ideas of particularly local usefulness.
15 In typical tongue in cheek fashion, he states the rule in quantitative form stating that it is 4.5 times harder to take something away than not to give it to them, claiming that he is basing this on how long his children cried when he said no to their request for an ice cream cone, and when he took it away from them after he had given it to them. We suspect that this was not a scientific study, and see it more as his making fun of many of the empirical statements that economists make based on highly limited data.