Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Turn In Recent Economics And Return Of Orthodoxy, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This paper examines change on the economics research frontier, and asks whether the current competition between new research programmes may be supplanted by a new single dominant approach in the future. The paper discusses whether economics tends to be dominated by a single approach or reflect a pluralism of approaches, and argues that, historically, it has alternated between the two. It argues that orthodoxy usually emerges from heterodoxy, and interprets the division between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in terms of a core–periphery distinction. Regarding recent economics, the paper maps out two different types of combinations of new research programmes as being …