New Article advocating for Synthesis of Pluralist Economics and Economic Planning Discourse

Recently the educational platform on heterodox economics ‘Exploring Economics‘ has published an article called “Towards a New Economics of Collapse and Construction“. This article locates capitalism in our current historical conjuncture of economic crisis and ecological breakdown. It diagnoses the dominance of mainstream neoclassical economics in academic education and policymaking as an integral part of this historical dilemma. The main contender for challenging this dominance is the discourse on heterodox/pluralist economics. But the article argues that because of its strong academic and methodological focus, as well as its fragmented nature, its unfit in its current form to actually challenge neoclassical economics’ dominance successfully. It then goes on to give an overview of different strands of the discourse around democratic economic planning. The planning debate offers a more concrete, problem-oriented approach, that is capable of uniting different methodologies while still maintaining strategic direction and coherence. On this basis the article argues for a synthesis of the discourse on planning and pluralist economics in order to effectively challenge the neoclassical hegemony in the academy and policy making.

Here’s an excerpt of the end of the article:

“In short, the planning paradigm offers a more potent strategic bridge than existing alternatives: it explicitly links pluralism’s intellectual richness to the institutional leverage points of curriculum reform while providing the integrative capacity to coalesce fragmented heterodox critiques—from feminist economics to Degrowth—around actionable solutions. This positions it uniquely to achieve the traction that specialized paradigms, despite their merits, have struggled to secure within academia and policy.”