Interview with Dr. Ivan Boldyrev

Teaching Economics: Academics Reflect #1

Rethinking Economics Nijmegen is proud to announce the launch of our interview series Teaching Economics: Academics Reflect, where we give the floor to academics at Radboud University. Through these interviews, we explore their thoughts on the future of economics and its role in society. 

We begin with Dr. Ivan Boldyrev, Assistant Professor in the Chair of Economic Theory and Policy at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Dr. Boldyrev teaches various subjects which involve heterodox economic theories.

(8-minute read)

What subjects do you teach and why are they important?

I teach Economic Methodology, where the central question is “How can we analyze current economics from the perspective of philosophy of science, or sociology of science?” and History of Economics, reviewing the major ideas of past economists and the key intellectual contributions of economic science to understanding social life. I also teach a master course called Current Issues, in which students get five papers from different disciplines that they have to discuss and then write a critical summary on. I am also involved in Happiness Economics, an interdisciplinary course on understanding happiness beyond simple measures of well-being. Finally, I coordinate the course Current Debates and Issues in International Political Economy, a course given by both economists and political scientists. 

How do you feel that the field of economics has changed in the past years? Or, how do you feel it is changing?

Economics is so big, there are many different processes happening. But one thing on which everyone agrees is that the role of theory in economics has receded in favor of empirical research (the so-called “empirical turn in economics”). The use of experiments  (both in the lab and in the field) is allowing economists to say something about causal connections, which are always difficult to make in social sciences.  

An important change in the economic profession that is slowly happening is the increasing presence of women. Female representation has been catastrophic especially compared to other social sciences, but there is a general trend of female researchers achieving more visibility. I expect more women entering the profession and more female Nobel prize winners. Furthermore, topics like household production, unequal exchange, invisible labor of women which are not reflected in statistical data are gaining due attention. 

Where do you think change happens in the discipline? Where does it start?

It is very hard to change the discipline because of its hierarchical organization which is a product of a very deeply ingrained system of incentives. There is a huge amount of resources invested in economics as an academic discipline, and many ambitious people who want to excel in their field compete for those select places and resources. The more money, the more resources are invested, the more fierce the competition becomes. And then, as academics, they compete for positions, publications, or places at the top journals. It is an endless race in which what is publishable is much more important than what your interest is in.

The most impactful change would be at the top academic journals, but also at the level of graduate education. There are for example a lot of fascinating connections between cultural anthropology and economics, but the fact is that venturing into this interdisciplinary domain is very unlikely to lead to a ‘top journal’ publication. Partly because of the competition, but also because the standards of validity in economics and other social sciences are so very different. And what is publishable in top academic journals is closely connected to graduate education because to be an economist you have to do a PhD, so you have to go to graduate school. This is the place where professional economists are being made. So, this space has to change as well.

Do you think these standards of validity and the norm of what is publishable should change? 

I think that will partly happen anyway. Fifty years ago, an empirical paper would matter much less than a theoretical one, now it is the other way around. But it is a very difficult question how the standards are going to change. Fundamental disagreements between the disciplines never disappear. By trying to overcome them you endanger the very identity of researchers who invested all their lives in particular research problems/methods, and they have to be respected for that, but this sets a limit to what you can do and say. 

Often economists find it very progressive and positive when they manage to reformulate something very complex into something small and preliminary. But tackling only such small questions means excluding big theories. Of course, there are shocks that we cannot anticipate. One recent shock was the emergence of Piketty and the whole perspective on inequality, which very much coincided with societal concerns. 

Do you think that economists should relate more to the bigger picture then?

I definitely think the bigger picture is missing in economics. Actually, the closure of economics for other disciplines is exceptional, you would never find such a self-referential research culture in any other social science. I think it has two reasons. First, the hierarchical structure in the discipline of economics: typically, only articles in the top 10 journals of the profession are deemed relevant [jj1]. Second, it is a consequence of the empirical turn and prioritizing methods over ideas: once you start doing only empirical work you risk losing the general picture. That was probably one of the reasons why economics was so slow in reacting to huge societal concerns, like inequality, but also, crucially, to climate change. 

What do you think of the empirical turn?

I think that there are good and bad sides to it. The good sides are of course that empirical researchers are much closer to what is happening and to other disciplines, just because they have a common ground which theoretical economists have much less. This common ground becomes very clear in the recent turn to history. More and more economists turn to history, use historical data, read historians, get confronted with historical ways of thinking. What could be bad is when theory is abandoned altogether, and with it the big picture of the economy. When questions become too small, not ambitious enough, you don’t really have a chance to suggest a new interpretation of economic phenomena. At least not the kind of new interpretations which, as we know from the history of the discipline, radically shifted our worldview, as was the case with the new perspective of Keynes, or of behavioral economists, or institutional economists. 

So how do you then think that the discipline should develop?

From my perspective, it should develop towards more openness from other disciplines. And more collaborative work. This is difficult for economists, much more difficult than for other social scientists.

Why do you think opening up to other disciplines is difficult?

Because of the incentive structure, especially in the US. After WWII, it was visible that a single set of instruments became standard. After that, the set of instruments could change, but a mainstream logic of orthodox economics remained. There is a value of univocity (meaning we have only one voice). Once there are other voices, these are recoded to this one voice. This value of orthodoxy has become much more substantial in the discipline than the value of dissent, or the value of pluralism and weighing different perspectives together. Though this is ubiquitous in other disciplines as well, they are often counterbalanced by other forces, which is not the case in economics. An exception is the global crisis of 2008, a big event for economics that contributed to some change in perspectives.

As Rethinking Economics,we aim  to diversify education and make economics education more pluralist. What do you think is the role of education in opening up the discipline?

A couple of years ago the CORE perspective produced the textbook The Economy. This is to my mind the biggest and most successful initiative in pluralist economic teaching so far. The team made a fantastic effort, as far as I could judge, in combining the most avant-garde economics with a broad view of institutions, of capitalism, of human behavior, with using the most up-to-date techniques present in mainstream economic theory. I know that at Radboud the book is in use. I also know there is a huge movement in Germany launched by students and called “Exploring Economics” that I find fascinating. 

But as I mentioned before, the key to change in academic economics is changing graduate education. Graduate programs are very standardized. And PhD education in economics, unlike in many other fields, is also really an education: you start again, spending two years or more doing courses, getting skills in order to become an academic economist. This is the place where the change is most needed and where I see the least progress yet. I know there has been good research, a kind of field sociological analysis of graduate programs, but I haven’t seen any recent studies on this. This is the site of change for the profession. All the future economists come from graduate schools.

And if you look specifically at Radboud, ideally speaking, if everything was possible, do you think that the programs we offer in the economics department should change, or should there be a completely different program added? 

Ideally speaking, I think the program is good. The PhD program is not like standard economic programs, which are bigger, like in Rotterdam. Ours is much smaller. One reason for that is that the department itself is not big. And it is very empirically oriented. It is defined by the interests of the professors. The ideal case would be that we have more coverage of subfields of economics so that we could offer students more expertise in such fields. I am thinking of some fascinating fields like economic history, economic sociology/sociology of finance. I think these fields require more development in the department. But all in all, we are trying to preserve these values of pluralism, also on the level of teaching. 

Do you think those opportunities should be facilitated more within the current curriculum?

I would welcome this. It is very difficult to organize interdisciplinary courses as it requires additional coordination. Such opportunities mostly exist on the master level. It is less possible in the bachelor because there are more students and because students have to get standard knowledge. But even there, one can teach differently and introduce various disciplinary perspectives. As far as I can judge, that is also being done. 

So, related to the fact that different disciplines have to engage with economics and the other way around, how do you see the role of economics in society now?

That is a very good question. Economics used to be the study of markets, the study of incentives, the study of rational decision-making. This is no longer the case. The empirical turn has led to studying cause and effect in society. Economics has always had this ambition of quantifying society to then suggest some kind of a normative blueprint for policy improvements. 

However, there are issues. It is not always clear when economic advice is being followed, and its influence could be so integrated into, e.g., day-to-day risk assessments that we do not see it anymore. Without seeing it, it is very difficult to critically assess it. The influence of economics on society could produce unexpected effects. All of this makes this process fascinating to study, which is actually what I have been trying to research in recent years. I cannot say that economics is always good for society, or always bad. 

It is interesting that you mention this normative blueprint, and the normative role of economics because philosophy is of course one of the domains that addresses ethics and normative behavior. Do you think that such a philosophical reflection is missing then? 

There are a lot of ways in which economics and philosophy clearly interact, e.g. in normative discussions of welfare. For many years economics has tried to abstract from these notions because economists felt that they endangered the neutrality of their advice and expertise. But it doesn’t work like that.  When you study social processes, and especially, when you suggest “optimal” policies, you are already making normative judgments. 

This has become more clear in recent decades. Amartya Sen or Martha Nussbaum – two scholars whose ideas are closely related and who come from different disciplines – symbolize the combination of philosophy and economics. It becomes clear that especially in development studies (where you have to decide what is good for humans in a country or for a human society) you inevitably get confronted with normative issues. The challenge is to make them explicit, to discuss them. I would also argue that the development of economics and analytical philosophy went hand in hand, sometimes driven by the same scholars [jj2]. 

Okay, final question, what do you think a future economist should look like?

I think any scientist, economists included, has to be open to other disciplines. It is probably the crucial feature. And while being open, (I don’t remember who said it, but it is a famous quote), you have to be open-minded, but not so that your brain falls out. So, the challenge is to master your own discipline and while mastering it, interact with other disciplines on an equal footing. So not just take a superficial element of another discipline, but really understand the logic behind other ways of thinking.

History, anthropology, sociology, philosophy have to (in)form economic analysis. So, I hope to see future economists more open to this. I am not expecting that they will all be pluralists, but I would really endorse more of them embracing a pluralist agenda. I think that is also crucial to better react to the challenges of the current society. 

 Interview conducted by Ilse Meijer

 [jj1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20191574

 [jj2] https://www.routledge.com/Patrick-Suppes-Economics-and-Economic-Methodology/Davis-Hands/p/book/9780367891848