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If you’ve ever wondered how the field of economics is changing from within, take a look at three pluralist articles. One is by Sheila Dow (2011), where she discusses how economics has neglected judgement and uses debatable means to assess data. Dow argues against the often empty use of formalism and generic use of econometrics, without having the student or researcher fine-tune their judgement about what to focus on or what to do in response. Dow, S. (2009). History of thought and methodology in pluralist economics education. International Review of Economics Education, 8(2), 41-57.
The second is by Wolfram Elsner (2017) which discusses the several opportunities to build a body of mutually conversing evolutionary-institutional (E-I) methods in order to consider the challenge of ‘meso’ scale. Elsner, W. (2010). The process and a simple logic of ‘meso’. Emergence and the co-evolution of institutions and group size. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 20(3), 445-477.
The third and most recent, is by Smita Srinivas (2020), looking under one umbrella of shared thinking, evolutionary political economy (EPE) as a conversation about scientific method. The Open Access article Srinivas, S. (2020). Institutional variety and the future of economics. Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, 1(1), 13-35. Economics, the article argues, hasn’t paid much attention to how inferences are drawn and judgements are made for development phenomena. EPE has many sub-schools with shared evolutionary-institutional perspectives. Yet, while EPE offers a strong opportunity to see how intra-paradigmatic contrast in science occurs, more is needed to lay out the scientific basis for inference and the taxonomy of phenomena.
The more economics wanders into the domain of policy, the more evident it becomes that attention to inferences and judgement is worth the time. Many economic students are under-prepared to deal with patchy data, data ambiguity, and negotiated teamwork in development where inferences vary widely and collective judgement is difficult to do.