“I’m a little bit troubled by the implied view that “heterodox” is an identity chosen by the heterodox for themselves.”

This depends. Clearly some people doing slightly “not-currently-mainstream” work are eager for the day they can sit within the mainstream. Partly this depends on how we define “heterodox” and “mainstream”. If Chicago is the orthodox mainstream (and it tends to be placed there by default), then luminaries from Keynes to Akerlof and Stiglitz are in a sense heterodox. But even being more broad about what is classed as mainstream, and consequently narrower about what constitutes heterodoxy, there are surely people on the outer who aren’t knowingly and wilfully positioning themselves on the margins.

That being said, I find it hard to interpret the behaviour of some people on the intellectual fringes of the position in any terms other than them wanting to be there and positioning themselves accordingly. One test of this is the extent to which they position themselves against a stylised “straw man” mainstream in their writings, against which they then rail.

This is a feature of the distinction/divide between “environmental economics” and “ecological economics”—one can view these as complementary research programs, with the ecological stuff being more eclectic and interdisciplinary (and that’s a fair reflection of what gets published in the journal Ecological Economics). On the other hand, I’ve sat in a room with a group of self-styled ecological economists, and it felt like a kind of cult meeting, the main aim being to recruit more people who weren’t part of the big orthodox sect.

in fairness, neoclassical models do have this property of “generality”; they’re wrong all the time.

No mention of the recent trend in advertising that renders ads as short films with an advertising tag-line at the end: ads as movie within movie and seen for pleasure. Instead all we get are propositional fictions as “reason.”

It strikes me more and more that philosophy is only a way to think about ideas as concrete and atemporal. One of the commenters at Marginal Revolution (who may or may not be an idiot depending on whether he means it as a compliment of a criticism) put it this way:

The heterodox approach is largely ignored by mainstream economics (re: neoclassical) because most of the insights are situation-dependent—that is, critical insights from the heterodox school lack the generality upon which neoclassical economics is based on. Most economists cannot and will not tolerate ad hoc explanations to human behaviour. One reason is because the math breaks down, and becomes mostly irrelevant.

And still no one comes out in defense of Tyler Cowen’s context free theory of economics and eugenics.

I think the CCC says that the way neoclassical economists attempt to reconcile concepts of financial capital and capital goods is invalid. You cannot validly insert a measure of financial capital into a production function or equate its marginal product to the interest rate. This does not say you cannnot, for some purposes, add up the value of capital goods.

But I always got the impression that the UK side of the debate was claiming that there was some way in which this point applied more specially to capital than to anything else, and that any reasoning about notions like returns to capital was automatically suspect.

This is crazy talk.

Historians are bad enough about intellectual history these days, but this is nuts.

“if lefties are forced to think, say, in terms of the stark clashes of interest often modeled in game theory, the assumptions that humans are rational, self-interested etc, then they will have to consider whether their proposals for the reform of society will work even if people aren’t as nice as left-wing reformers might wish they were.”

Hell, why stop there. Why not consider if their proposals for the reform of society will work if people are brain eating zombies? Or frontal lobe damaged sociopaths. I mean if it can stand up under those circumstances… Of course there’s always a danger that the optimal model for those circumstances (call it the paranoid schizophrenic model), may not be the best model for human beings who have some vaguely decent characteristics.

“If they understand the circumstances under which markets do work”

Do mainstream economists? I mean seriously, when it comes to dealing with real markets there seems to be very little agreement on what is necessary to improve the functioning of markets (with the agreements having more to do with ideology, than actual analysis). And,hell the basic model of equilibrium is very elegant, but you have to search pretty long and hard for an actual example in the real world.

You realise that you’ve basically conceded here that you don’t care about the scientific/intellectual rigour of economics. It could be that if the terms in which you express your case are logically incoherent, then your argument is completely wrong. For you, neoclassical frameworks have a rhetorical power – they enable you to win arguments, but you don’t know (and seem reasonably okay with this) if they’re actually right, or accurate.

It also seems kind of circular. Neoclassical economics is better, because people believe it and neoclassical economists control the gates. Economists control the gates and people believe it because they were taught it, because well..

Paras 4 and 6: As dsquared and Ingrid say heterodox is a label that gets forced on many of us—at some point we naively imagine we can join a mainstream conversation on some question, but the moment those folks smell skepticism we’re put through a catechism of do you believe this and will you abide by that methodological (which really means ontological) precept. We’ve accepted the term, and it has facilitated some good cross-heterodox conversations. But I’m tired of the assumption that hets have to define themselves in relation to orthodox econ and that their essential contribution consists of critiques of it. It’s somehow our responsibility to convince people who don’t read our work and don’t know the fundamental literatures we draw on. Para 6 ends with the standard “if it were a good idea we would already have adopted it” argument, whose circularity should be obvious.

The posting halfway-acknowledges its last bit of circularity. If you define the mainstream as ontological individualism plus formalization, then yes as long as you abide by that you can do mainstream work. But in feminist econ, for example, a lot of interesting work is being done on households and care-work (e.g. Nancy Folbre, Julie Nelson), which requires thinking about relations, intersubjectivity, and the possibility people might act out of love or responsibility, concepts alien to either individualist or structuralist ontologies. The reason mainstreamers like John Q automatically think of structuralism as the only alternative to individualism is that both are easy to formalize. I have a personal bias here, but Charusheela’s Structuralism and Individualism in Economic Analysis: The “Contractionary Devaluation Debate” in Development Economics (Routledge 2004) is a useful discussion of the way the individualist-structuralist dichotomy hides agreement on ontological underpinnings.

Methodological individualism has very little place in the arts. The avant garde always ends up contextualized within the time of its making, not after; and is seen at its best as exemplary of that period. In the wider culture the fallacy of intention is seen most often for what it is.

It would help to see the arts, literature et al. as philosophical thought on questions of intention and determinism. And of course the arts and very specific forms of the arts are indeed “prospering” these days.