Heterodox economics

[1] Groups typically classed as heterodox in current discourse include the Austrian, ecological,[note 1] Marxist-historical, post-autistic, and modern monetary approaches.

[5] In the mid-19th century, such thinkers as Auguste Comte, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Karl Marx made early critiques of orthodox economy.

Joseph Henry, an American physicist and first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, remarked that the "fundamental principle of political economy is that the physical labor of man can only be ameliorated by… the transformation of matter from a crude state to an artificial condition...by expending what is called power or energy.

One key development has been an epistemic turn away from theory towards an empirically driven approach focused centrally on questions of causal inference.

When some economists' studies do not embrace the rationality assumption, they are seen as placing the analyses outside the boundaries of the neoclassical economics discipline (Landsberg 1989, 596).

Neoclassical economics begins with the a priori assumptions that agents are rational and that they seek to maximize their individual utility (or profits) subject to environmental constraints.

Mainstream microeconomics may be defined in terms of optimization and equilibrium, following the approaches of Paul Samuelson and Hal Varian.

Leading heterodox thinkers have moved beyond the established paradigms of Austrian, Feminist, Institutional-Evolutionary, Marxian, Post Keynesian, Radical, Social, and Sraffian economics—opening up new lines of analysis, criticism, and dialogue among dissenting schools of thought.

This cross-fertilization of ideas is creating a new generation of scholarship in which novel combinations of heterodox ideas are being brought to bear on important contemporary and historical problems, such as socially grounded reconstructions of the individual in economic theory; the goals and tools of economic measurement and professional ethics; the complexities of policymaking in today's global political economy; and innovative connections among formerly separate theoretical traditions (Marxian, Austrian, feminist, ecological, Sraffian, institutionalist, and post-Keynesian) (for a review of post-Keynesian economics, see Lavoie (1992); Rochon (1999)).

He suggests that heterodox economists should embrace rigorous mathematics and attempt to work from within the mainstream, rather than treating it as an enemy.