Title: In what direction is economics heading?

Authors: Sam de Muijnck

Addresses: The Centre for Economy Studies, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abstract: In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, the status of economics has increasingly come under attack. A central critique is that economics is dogmatic in its adherence to its orthodox tenets. Several studies on current developments in economics, however, argue that mainstream economics has moved beyond the previous orthodoxy. To empirically determine which view is correct, a computational text analysis of PhD dissertations between 2010 and 2017 at five top-ranking universities is performed. The text analysis shows that most of the dissertations explicitly engage with orthodox mainstream economics, while about a quarter do so with nonorthodox mainstream economics. Heterodox economics gets substantially less attention as only 10% of the dissertations engage with it. The findings thus support the view that orthodox economics is still dominant, although it coexists with some nonorthodox mainstream approaches. There is little change over time in the shares of dissertations that engage with the different categories of economics. This runs counter to the idea that the dominance of the current orthodoxy is fading.

Keywords: mainstream economics; pluralism; quantitative history of economic thought.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPEE.2023.136074

International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education, 2023 Vol.14 No.2, pp.94 - 120

Received: 01 Nov 2022
Accepted: 06 Oct 2023
Published online: 15 Jan 2024 *

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