This Monday, the self-professed heterodox economist, Ha-Joon Chang, came over to Manchester to deliver a speech to an assorted group of students, a speech designed to sketch out the significant, historical threads of economic thought, and to propose a principle solution to our current problem: the ugly bias of mainstream economics, and its suffocating refusal to spread its wings and catch the enlightening breeze of critical debate and competing theory.
Ha-Joon’s talk was thoroughly engaging and refreshing: one student quite fittingly said that a lecture of the kind Ha-Joon delivered should have been presented to us at the very start of our Economics degrees. Two points of importance were emphasised: that firstly, Economics as an academic discipline cannot possibly be confined to the limits of mathematical business models, or the diagnosis of market structure. For Economics, as Chang insisted, is the ‘ultimate question’ of our environment, an endless pursuit to understand the clockwork logic of the relations binding humans to the finite realm of our surrounding resources. Finally, Chang concluded that Economics holds an imperative duty to accommodate and enmesh every style of economic theory. The world, he went on, is simply ‘too complex’ a place to wrap neatly into a glove of singular theory: our understanding of things, surely, will only ever advance once we truly do allow for one hundred thinking flowers to freely ‘bloom’, and then, in confrontation with one another, ‘cross-fertilise’.