Key take away:

• Economics needs to be more interdisciplinary (to understand the limitations of ours and others perspectives > a pluralistic approach to economics (creating menu’s of options using different disciplines)

Being able to assess where an idea/argument/policy has come from (in terms of economics school of thought i.e. neoclassical) and understand it’s perspective and what it may lack in nuance compared to other schools of thoughts. Being able to have all of the cards on the table as a new-economic thinker is essential to create balanced perspectives that are grounded in the context that fuels the topic. Context is essential alongside the scientific elements of economics.

• how do we think of markets and why? How are we assessing markets? How are we seeing them created?
• What actually leads us to progress? Is capitalism progress? There are examples throughout history of more developed societies that are not capitalist. What were they? How did they function and what principles were they built from? How do different societies who are not organised for capitalism react to it? How do we define ‘undeveloped communities’ and push capitalism on them? (progress is measured through GDP but there is a growing literature on how GDP does not measure impact on happiness or things like the environment. (the concept of progress as ‘growth’)
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What is an economic paradigm?

Essentially, it’s a dominant way of viewing something > economics has shifted from a classical perspective towards the economics as a science but the over reliance on assumptions like rationality is bad as it lacks social, political and historical context.

• In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first published in 1962), Kuhn defines a scientific paradigm as: "universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners, i.e., what is to be observed and scrutinized. > His idea that the development of science has periods of stable growth punctuated by the scientific revolutions is based on the cycle of normal science, crisis, and revolution. For him, such regularity in the development of various sciences is a paradigm which he thought to be a general feature of science

Neoclassical has been the dominant paradigm for a long time.

• Milonakis, D., & Fine, B. (2009). ‘Introduction’. > The book argues for a reintroduction of the social and historical dimensions into economics and political economy, transcending disciplinary boundaries and emphasising their relevance to economic theory.
• Adam Smith and Karl Marx incorporated the social, psychological, and historical aspects into their analyses, considering political economy a unified social science but were not big voices of their time.
• This shift to a science made economics sharper but lacks contextual foundations and broader/deeper understandings
• Mazzucato argues that the valuation of economic goods and services is inherently social and political, challenging the perspective of neoclassical economists who treat it as a purely individual and market-based phenomenon.

Is there one way to do economics?

No, essentially there is always more than one way of looking at something. If you look at one problem/challenge through a particular economic lens then you will get a particular type of answer. We should look at these things through different perspectives to create critical and balanced arguments.

Key analytical methods?