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ABSTRACT
In this paper we ask, what is mainstream economics education conveying to its students? Standard mainstream economics textbooks treat the environment as a specialist issue in addition to standard concerns and based on solutions that conform to those standard concerns. When viewed as socialisation for students this is a major problem. To illustrate the problems we set out key aspects of the standard format, and draw attention to the structure and contents from two well-known textbooks. Standard textbooks convey the impression that the ‘environmental issue’ is appropriately incorporated and exhibit two complacency-creating features. First, fundamental problems (acute global ecological breakdown, biodiversity loss, climate change crisis etc), issues and urgency cannot be adequately conveyed to students within this way of framing economics. Second, specific theory and policy solutions suggest that the problem is well in hand. We illustrate using the theory of negative externalities.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Lakoff is not a material reductionist or behavioral determinist regarding the brain-mind, but he does argue that we develop a set of neural circuitry that is triggered by situations and language use and which shapes how we think about given subjects:
we think in terms of typically unconscious structures called ‘frames’ [which] include semantic roles, relations between roles and relations to other frames … All our knowledge makes use of frames, and every word is defined through the frames it neurally activates. All thinking and talking involves ‘framing’. (Lakoff, Citation2010, pp. 71–72)
2 Increasing frustration with mainstream economics during the 1980s led to formation in 1989 of the International Society for Ecological Economics and the journal Ecological Economics (and there have been many notable figures besides Daly, for example, Robert Costanza). Over the years, ecological economics has become a parallel discipline to mainstream economics and environmental economics. Like many movements that find themselves seeking to influence or displace a dominant approach, it has faced challenges regarding the concessions and compromises that might be involved (and criticisms range from the claim that some working on ‘ecological economics’ are methodologically little different than mainstream economists, to the claim that there needs to be a more urgent focus on policy activism that squarely confronts the need for both degrowth and a transition away from capitalism). Since the purpose of this paper is to highlight the socializing effects of mainstream economics rather than the relative merits of different strands of ecological theory and activism, we merely acknowledge that there are important differences (and that Clive Spash provides extensive discussion of the issues in his various writings e.g. Spash, Citation2018). Julie Nelson, for example, looks at the issues differently than Spash (Nelson & Morgan, Citation2020).
3 There are many critiques of the ideological role of scarcity in economics in systems of abundance predicated on the creation of superfluous need (perhaps the best known in the mainstream is Galbraith, Citation1958, but there are numerous works with more ecological focus, e.g. Schumacher, Citation1993).
4 To be clear, data exist on ‘material flows’, the point is that this is not what economics is founded on (see Wiedmann et al., Citation2015).
5 To be clear, one can distinguish between material growth and valuation growth; GDP measures valuation growth, but the basis of an economy remains material process.
6 To be clear, however, this is not to suggest alternatives are necessarily ecological in focus (this varies), merely that they note a set of standard characteristics in mainstream economic textbooks (most commonly a monistic unified and analytical framework, heavy initial focus on market competition and general absence of real pluralism and encouragement of critical thinking – despite that mainstream economists think that their work is diverse, plural and critical).
7 The best known ‘ontological’ version of this critique derives from the work of Tony Lawson (e.g. Lawson, Citation2015).
8 This remains the case even when mainstream economists are more reticent regarding use of the term ‘positive’, since they simply substitute the phrase quantified science and make equivalent claims.
9 Note, the point is that deduction is basic to demonstration of mainstream theory via axiomatic constructs and mathematical proofs; the mainstream also recognizes induction, but has problems with abduction and other approaches.
10 Our purpose here is to emphasize that mainstream economics focuses on the individual; it is also the case that mainstream economic theory presupposes structural conditions (even though it usually adopts methodological individualism) and one should note that the focus on the individual is itself a consequence of structured social relations. One might also note that it is increasingly common in economics to recognize limits to the rationality of economic agents; however, this still takes as its point of departure or benchmark the ideal rational calculative type. Referring to more realistic behavior as irrational speaks volumes.
11 There is, as readers may be aware, a longstanding project in economics of ‘imperialism’ set in motion by the Chicago School economists George Stigler and Gary Becker in the last century.
12 So, the textbook format is just one component of a complex process of socialization that has made mainstream economics quite different than other social sciences. Besides heterodox critics, the sociologist Marion Fourcade is perhaps best known for exploring this subject (Fourcade et al., Citation2015; Fourcade, Citation2009).
13 Mankiw's textbooks, like those of many prominent mainstream economists, have a global reach and extend beyond the English speaking world.
14 The reader may see that the subtext here is that ‘beauty’ is a much valued virtue in mathematics. At the time of the early phase of the Global Financial Crisis, Paul Krugman wrote an open letter to his fellow economists (though we note that Krugman is also a mainstream New Keynesian economist who has continued to support axiomatic theory forms) and in that letter (which eventually over a thousand others signed, including one of the authors of this article) he made the argument that Economics as a discipline should not be criticized for not predicting the great financial crisis of 2008 (though some economists, notably Steve Keen, had in fact anticipated the crisis), but rather for having taken ‘the beauty of their equations’ to represent ‘truth’ about the Real Economy.
15 And to illustrate how pervasive this reasoning has been, (noting again the list we made in the Editorial Introduction) William Nordhaus calculated an ‘optimum’ increase in global temperature of plus 4 degrees centigrade, based on a similar perspective, while however ignoring the mounting scientific consensus that such a level of global temperature increase over pre-industrial levels would at the very least cause vast ecological and social damage and perhaps produce runaway and irreversible warming, leading to the extinction of the human species.
16 In a price signaling market system, ‘sustainable’ means no more than ‘is profitable’. A production process or the use of a resource can remain ‘sustainable’ in this sense for a lot longer than ‘sustainable’ might mean in terms of the effects of the market process on the environment. Cars may be market ‘sustainable’ as long as we can afford petrol – but the effects may not be objectively sustainable long before we run out of oil and long before we are individually prepared to give cars up or society has provided us with alternatives. In any case, what people want doesn't necessarily equal what is sustainable or socially desirable from a price signaling point of view (bottled water and chewing gum?).
17 To be clear, degrowth is being used loosely here to refer to advocacy of reduced scale, rather than to refer only to the social movement, which is just one project among many with this goal.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Barry Gills
Barry Gills is Editor in Chief of Globalizations and Professor of Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. He has written widely on World System theory, neoliberalism, globalization, global crises, democracy, and resistance.
Jamie Morgan
Jamie Morgan is Professor of Economic Sociology at Leeds Beckett University. He co-edits the Real-World Economics Review with Edward Fullbrook. He has published widely in the fields of economics, political economy, philosophy, sociology and international politics. His recent books include: Modern monetary theory and its critics (Ed. with Edward Fullbrook, World Economics Association Books, 2020); Economics and the ecosystem (Ed. with Edward Fullbrook, World Economics Association Books, 2019); Realist responses to post-human society: Ex machina (Ed. with I. Al-Amoudi, Routledge, 2018); Brexit and the political economy of fragmentation: Things fall apart (Ed. with H. Patomäki, Routledge, 2018); Trumponomics: Causes and consequences (Ed. with E. Fullbrook, College Publications, 2017); What is neoclassical economics? (Ed, Routledge, 2015); and Piketty’s capital in the twenty-first century (Ed. with E. Fullbrook, College Publications, 2014).