Welcome to Deeper Economics

We have recently seen the beginning of the first moderately severe recession since the oil shocks and stagflation of the 1970s. Much as that decade produced great changes in Economic policy through the widespread adoption of some form of Monetarism, we believe that the shocks of the forthcoming decade shall also provoke great debate in the realm of Economics, especially as demand greatly outstrips the supply of our primary energy sources and all the goods, raw materials, inputs and services which depend upon easily transportable energy will surely become drastically transformed. Considering this, it is plain to anyone that Economics is going to return to being much more important in everyday discussion and debate over the coming two decades, and that Economists will once again be asked to suggest avenues forward.

It is upon this point that we are worried, especially after witnessing the structure of debate which followed the publication of the Stern report which made an attempt to economically analyse the effects of climate change. Our schools and universities produce the finest students in the world who excel in their knowledge of Economic Theory and practice, and are more than capable of performing the requisite statistical analysis and application of logical and rational thought in the genesis of Economic advice and policy. Without doubt, we have successfully constructed a system of education which instils into students the knowledge and understanding of the current best available system of Economics analysis, and the presentation of this system internationally is remarkably homogenous and consistent even across diverse cultural boundaries - and for which the profession should be rightly proud.

Knowing how in Economics, but not knowing why

Yet while students (and many of the younger staff) know how to do, they invariably do not know why they do because little to no explanation was presented during their education as to why contemporary Economic Theory presently has the form that it does. This in our opinion has two major consequences: (i) it aids the propagation of ill judged and sometimes dangerous pseudo-economics because the majority of the profession are increasingly unable to justify the decisions historically taken by the profession and (ii)  relatedly, we fear that much of the profession is becoming ill placed to handle or usefully contribute to the coming maelstrom because they are insufficiently educated in the wider context. We once used to commonly teach Economic History as part of the standard curriculum, yet this has become rare especially in the elite schools (Colander, 2007) despite that most  senior academics we have spoken to in those schools wish it were otherwise. We do not wish to roll back the clock - when taught, Economic History tends to be presented as separate and abstract from the Economic Theory taught, and in our opinion this is nearly as bad as not teaching any Economic History at all.

What to do

We believe that the time has come to change how Economics is taught - to move from the traditional micro/macro semesterised flip/flop curriculum onto a multi-stranded, critical pedagogy with a greater weight upon practical computational discourse and analysis, and with a particular emphasis on the controversies of today in Economic Theory. We find it particularly amazing that such little time is spent at undergraduate level studying the more recent papers to receive the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences - how it can be the general case that graduates are so generally ignorant of those works receiving one of the profession's highest awards is beyond us. Indeed, had more people in the financial services industry been made aware of the content of these papers, we are very sure that the "credit crunch" and the improper handling of systemic risk could not have occurred.

In essence, we do not think that the Economics profession has failed society ... yet. We instead seek to better instil into students - and those teaching them - the knowledge required to demonstrate the truth that the Economic Theory taught today is the best known system of Economic Theory available. We believe that a critical pedagogy in Economics should show how Economic theories work, why and in what forms they work, and the strengths and limitations of those theories such that any good student can both defend their strengths while understanding fully their weaknesses. In short, we wish to produce students who can skilfully and accurately defend standard Economics in prose and in debate, and thus usefully contribute to the coming debate.

How YOU can help

The development of a pedagogy is a large undertaking: one must firstly decide on what must be left out as there simply isn't enough time, space and often resources in a real life educational context. Next, one must define a curriculum based on that pedagogy i.e. the structure of the modules, forms of assessment and allocation of credits - whilst somehow remaining compatible with all the ongoing changes presently happening here (see the Bologna Process). Thirdly, one must design and construct the syllabi of the modules which form the curriculum on a lecture by lecture basis - which is hard enough in one university let alone trying to generate a syllabus adaptable enough to reasonably fit most universities irrespective of local structure. And fourthly, and most importantly of all, any pedagogy is only useful when people are actually using it in daily practice which requires a large and substantial marketing effort sustained over many years.

To these ends, we present here at deepereconomics.org an online and colloboratively developed critical pedgagy for the teaching of Economics and the supply of learning resources for staff and students. This website is open to everyone for contributions, suggestions and feedback. Each page is publicly accessible and can be commented upon anonymously, however to gain the ability to post messages into our discussion forums one must register for an account.

Contributions or changes to the site documents undergo a peer review process before publication - if your contribution or modification meets the submission prerequisites, the chances are that your changes will be accepted especially if they pass muster in the forums. Additional weight is given to those with RePEc publications.

Lastly, even if you can't contribute much material, you can help by downloading the content from here and trying it out in your local university or school and giving us feedback via the forums or by adding comments. All material here is licensed under the same licence as Wikipedia and other similar sites: a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License so anyone can use or modify it freely (with attribution and so long as the derived work is similarly made available). For more details, see this page.