Mainstream economics

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Mainstream economics is the term used to distinguish certain approaches and schools of thought in economics from heterodox approaches and schools such as feminist economics and Marxian economics. Mainstream economists do not, in general, identify themselves as members of a particular school; they may, however, be associated with approaches within a field such as the rational-expectations approach to macroeconomics.

The term came into common use in the late 20th century. It appears in the influential textbook by Samuelson and Nordhaus, on the inside back cover in the "Family Tree of Economics," which depicts arrows into it from J.M. Keynes (1936) and neoclassical economics (1860-1910). An earlier and narrower term first appearing in Samuelson's textbook (1955), is neoclassical synthesis (of neoclassical economics and Keynesian macroeconomics). Mainstream economics includes theories of market and government failure and private and public goods. These developments suggest a range of views on the desirability or otherwise of government intervention.

Mainstream economics may employ axioms or postulates in stating a theory. Testing the theoretical and empirical implications of those postulates is a standard method of mainstream economics.

Some fields may be described as being partly within mainstream economics, partly within heterodox economics. Some of them are Austrian economics, institutional economics, neuroeconomics and non-linear complexity theory. They may use neoclassical economics as a point of departure. Yet, recent research suggests that "neoclassical economics no longer dominates a mainstream economics.

A countervailing trend is the expansion of mainstream methods to such seemingly distant fields as crime the family, law, politics, and religion. The latter phenomenon is sometimes referred to as economic imperialism.

References

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Last updated on Wednesday December 19, 2007 at 20:50:42 PST (GMT -0800)
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