By Dr Omar Feraboli, Lecturer of Economics, University of Dundee

IN a post-crash world of Brexit, Trump and ongoing questions over Scotland’s constitutional future, it is more important than ever that our future economists, bankers, politicians and policy makers are exposed to a wide variety of economic ideas as they face up to the big challenges of our time.

The 2007-08 global economic crisis highlighted the inability of mainstream economic theory to explain the real world. Over the past decade, mainstream economics has been extensively criticised and there has been demand worldwide for alternative, heterodox and innovative approaches both in research and teaching.

Even mainstream economists raised questions about the validity of their own approaches. The Nobel laureate Paul Krugman argues that economics neglect several limitations of human rational behaviour which lead to speculative bubbles particularly in financial markets and therefore cause unpredictable crashes.

Pluralist and heterodox economic ideas, which had been marginalised and ignored since the 1970s, have therefore begun to gain momentum in the debate about economics research, policy and teaching. These approaches are rooted in several authors who played a fundamental role in shaping economics ideas over the past centuries, and who should be rediscovered in both research and teaching. Their theoretical approaches and research methodologies can address economic questions more realistically. They can also provide alternative perspectives in the curriculum and therefore stimulate the debate on economic theory that enriches the students’ experience.

One such author is the Austrian Joseph Schumpeter. His approach departs dramatically from the mainstream economic theories which are mainly based on the concept of market equilibrium. Instead, Schumpeter’s analysis focuses on disequilibrium as he argued markets are unstable and capitalism is by nature a form of continuous economic change. Schumpeter’s essential point about capitalism is “creative destruction”, which is described as a process of incessant mutation in the economy from within. Such a process destroys incessantly the old structure and creates incessantly a new one.

The Italian economist Paolo Sylos Labini is another also to be rediscovered in economics curriculum as he based his analysis on the realistic assumption that markets are oligopolistic. So, a small number of large firms operate in one market and therefore they are able to affect prices. Mainstream economic analysis, instead, is based on perfect competition in which firms have no influence on prices and can only choose the quantity of goods they produce, which is not at all what we observe in the real world.

The final argument of the above discussion is that current economics students should be taught to be economists, not to become devoted disciples of one particular school of thought. This can be achieved by introducing alternative, innovative and pluralist ideas in the economics curriculum. This would stimulate students to challenge the mainstream viewpoints and to discuss how economics should evolve in the light of its inadequacies and fallacies.

At the University of Dundee, we will host the conference Teaching Economics in the 21st Century: Post-Crash Economics othis Wednesday. This tries to contribute to such a fundamental process. We want to involve students in the debate by allowing them to provide and to discuss their experiences and reflections about being taught economics. We want to engage in the debate about the need for new approaches to economics teaching and research. We want to give both academics and students the opportunity to share knowledge and experiences about teaching and learning economics at university. Finally, we want to bring together academics and students who are committed to maintaining and to developing an economics discipline which has relevance and realism to contemporary and future challenges.