• Corpus ID: 153821743

A pluralist approach to microeconomics

@inproceedings{Keen2009APA,
  title={A pluralist approach to microeconomics},
  author={Steve Keen},
  year={2009}
}

• S. Keen
• Published 2009
• Economics

A great strength of traditional economics is the absence of a welldeveloped, coherent alternative. The pressure to teach something often results in orthodox microeconomics ruling the roost. However, political economists should not be afraid to teach approaches which, in apparent contrast to the logically complete traditional economics of the firm, are inchoate and do not answer every question. A new approach is never born complete but evolves, and the process of teaching an alternative from an incomplete starting point can lead to its development over time. However, an essential first is to demonstrate to students that the ostensibly welldeveloped and coherent traditional model is in fact an empty shell. That is difficult in a principles course, since the increase in business majors and the relegation of economics to a service role has dumbed down the content so much that critiquing it is problematic: it is hard to critique something that is itself so nebulous. The potential for a critique arises at the intermediate level, where the mathematical treatment is first encountered. Many political economists eschew mathematics, often because it is seen as part of why traditional economics is so flawed. Ironically, however, it is precisely when traditional economics is presented mathematically that it is most vulnerable – especially at the level of intermediate microeconomics, where the foundations are still essentially Marshallian – because the mathematics itself is fallacious. I begin my teaching of heterodox microeconomics by recapping traditional microeconomics, and then demonstrating that the following two key aspects of the theory are mathematically false.