Jamie Morgan - What is Neoclassical Economics?: Debating the origins, meaning and significance

What is Neoclassical Economics?

Despite some diversification, modern economics still attracts a great deal of criticism. This is largely due to highly unrealistic assumptions underpinning economic theory, explanatory failure, poor policy framing and a dubious focus on prediction. Many argue that flaws continue to owe much of their shortcomings to neoclassical economics. As a result, what we mean by neoclassical economics remains a significant issue. This collection addresses the issue from a new perspective, taking as its point of departure Tony Lawsons essay What is this school called neoclassical economics?.

Few terms are as controversial for pluralist and heterodox economists as neoclassical economics. This controversy has many aspects, because the term itself has different specifications and connotations. Within this multiplicity what we mean by neoclassical matters to pluralist and heterodox economists for two primary reasons. First, because it informs how we view and critique the mainstream; second, because the relationship between heterodox and mainstream economics influences how heterodox economists model, apply methods and construct theory. The chapters in this collection each have different things to say about these matters, with contributions ranging across the work of key thinkers, such as Thorstein Veblen and Kenneth Arrow, applied issues of non-linear modelling of dynamic systems and key events in the history of economics.

This book will be of use to those interested in methodology, political economy, heterodoxy and the history of economic thought.

Jamie Morgan is R eader at the S chool of A ccounting, F inance and E conomics, Leeds Beckett University, UK.

Economics as Social Theory
edited by Tony Lawson
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

Social theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies and of the types of method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects, are re-emerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure, between economy and the rest of society, and between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. There is a renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order, organisation, power probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty, value, etc.

The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary economics the label theory has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical modelling. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the theory label, offering a platform for alternative rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorising.

Other titles in this series include:

1. Economics and Language
Edited by Willie Henderson

2. Rationality, Institutions and Economic Methodology
Edited by Uskali Mki, Bo Gustafsson and Christian Knudsen

3. New Directions in Economic Methodology
Edited by Roger Backhouse

4. Who Pays for the Kids?
Nancy Folbre

5. Rules and Choice in Economics
Viktor Vanberg

6. Beyond Rhetoric and Realism in Economics
Thomas A. Boylan and Paschal F. OGorman

7. Feminism, Objectivity and Economics
Julie A. Nelson

8. Economic Evolution
Jack J. Vromen

9. Economics and Reality
Tony Lawson

10. The Market
John O Neill

11. Economics and Utopia
Geoff Hodgson

12. Critical Realism in Economics
Edited by Steve Fleetwood

13. The New Economic Criticism
Edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen

14. What do Economists Know?
Edited by Robert F. Garnett, Jr.

15. Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge
Edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio

16. The Values of Economics
An Aristotelian perspective
Irene van Staveren

17. How Economics Forgot History
The problem of historical specificity in social science
Geoffrey M. Hodgson

18. Intersubjectivity in Economics
Agents and structures
Edward Fullbrook

19. The World of Consumption, 2nd edition
The material and cultural revisited
Ben Fine

20. Reorienting Economics
Tony Lawson

21. Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics
Edited by Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper

22. The Crisis in Economics
Edited by Edward Fullbrook

23. The Philosophy of Keynes Economics
Probability, uncertainty and convention
Edited by Jochen Runde and Sohei Mizuhara

24. Postcolonialism Meets Economics
Edited by Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela

25. The Evolution of Institutional Economics
Agency, structure and Darwinism in American institutionalism
Geoffrey M. Hodgson

26. Transforming Economics
Perspectives on the critical realist project
Edited by Paul Lewis

27. New Departures in Marxian Theory
Edited by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff

28. Markets, Deliberation and Environmental Value
John ONeill

29. Speaking of Economics
How to get in the conversation
Arjo Klamer

30. From Political Economy to Economics
Method, the social and the historical in the evolution of economic theory
Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine

31. From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics
The shifting boundaries between economics and other social sciences
Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine

32. Development and Globalization
A Marxian class analysis
David Ruccio

33. Introducing Money
Mark Peacock

34. The Cambridge Revival of Political Economy
Nuno Ornelas Martins

35. Understanding Development Economics
Its challenge to development studies
Adam Fforde

36. Economic Methodology
An historical introduction
Harro Maas
Translated by Liz Waters

37. Social Ontology and Modern Economics
Stephen Pratten

38. History of Financial Crises
Dreams and follies of expectations
Cihan Bilginsoy

39. Commerce and Community
Ecologies of social cooperation
Robert F. Garnett, Jr., Paul Lewis and Lenore T. Ealy

40. The Nature and State of Modern Economics
Tony Lawson

41. The Philosophy, Politics and Economics of Finance in the 21st century
From hubris to disgrace
Edited by Patrick OSullivan, Nigel F. B. Allington and Mark Esposito

42. The Philosophy of Debt
Alexander X. Douglas

43. What is Neoclassical Economics?
Debating the origins, meaning and significance
Edited by Jamie Morgan

First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge