In June 2000, a group of students whose names was not disclosed launched a petition complaining about the teaching of economics and the abuse of mathematics in that discipline. I originally thought it was a typically franco-french quarrel, another excuse not to talk about real problems; but it turns out that they have their followers abroad and that the international press is starting to pay attention to it. So I thought it would be useful to give some clarifications.

    This attack is part of a general atmosphere of witch-hunting against economics and economists. The reason, I suspect, is that economics is not very friendly to the dominant  ideology held by the intellectual establishment and by many sectors of the ruling left-wing coalition.  Every month a new book is out complaining about the inhumanity of markets and globalization [1] or accusing economists of being immoral, incompetent, or dishonest [2]. One reads articles telling us that mathematics are the instrument of capitalist exploitation and that economists advocate the abolishment of democracy in order to impose the views of multinational corporations [3]. In the spring, we got a grande première: unions signed a manifesto protesting against the publication in a scientific journal of two articles which concluded that the minimum wage destroys jobs and that the welfare state reduces the unemployed's incentives to look for jobs. The manifesto included insulting insinuations against the quality of the research made by the authors, two leading French economists widely published in the top international journals.[4]

    At about the same time,  we got that other manifesto published in "Le Monde", which is both pro-government and very influential among French educated elites. A group of students from top undergraduate programmes in French universities criticized the teaching of economics. They have already achieved a lot: after having read their petition in the newspaper, the minister of education, Jack Lang, decided to launch a reform of the teaching of economics. At this stage, it is unclear what the outcome will be.

    The three main complaints are (i) there is an excess use of mathematical formalism for the sake of it; (ii) economics is cut from the real world; and (iii) there should be more "pluralism", i.e. more attention given to non-orthodox approaches and other disciplines. This sounds reasonable and it is of course important to improve pedagogy. But one does not solve pedagogical problems by sending manifestos to newspapers, especially one that has been very supportive of the "Asterix"-style movement against globalization, de-regulation, and more generally markets, that has been burgeoning in France in the last two or three years.  In fact, it is just another battle in the political war against economics. The ultimate goal is to impose the teaching of an "alternative" kind of economics, which, in my view, would be as flawed and useless as Lyssenko's biology.
    When one looks in detail at their  proposal one realizes that the goal has little to do with pedagogy. These students are not complaining about the way economics is being taught to them. They are complaining about the contents of their courses, i.e. about the discipline itself. Let us examine these complaints

1. Mathematics.
    Mathematics is the language of modern economic analysis. Its relationship to the real world is the same as that of other languages: things, concepts, and ideas are represented by symbols and the relationships among these objects are made explicit by expressions that obey a given set of syntactic rules. In the case of mathematics these rules are the rules of logic.
    Mathematics has imposed itself in main stream economics, because it turns out to be the only way to check the logical consistency of the analysis and to carry its predictions to the data, that are quantitative in essence. The unfortunate result is that economics is no more fun to learn than fluid mechanics. But that does not mean it should be changed, even less that the students should decide what it should be. Up to now, it has been possible to teach undergraduate economics in France in a fairly mathematical way because teachers were used to have students fairly literate in that area. In contrast, American teachers had to do contorsions in order to avoid calling a derivative a derivative. As a result they taught the same economics in a more entertaining and accessible fashion, but with less rigour and precision. That French students now complain about mathematics is the sign of the degradation of scientific culture in our country. In fact, one of the complaints is that student enrollment is dropping in economics; but one also sees it dropping even faster in science. This is all the more ironical than virtually all our improvements in living standards over the last century is due to science. Anyway, the obvious solution is to teach the American way, by means of graphs and numerical examples. This does not change the substance of what is being taught. But I would much prefer a responsible and ambitious curriculum at the high school level, as well as an explicit recognition that a given level in mathematics is necessary in order to become an economist.

2. The real world.

    In the manifesto one reads: " Most of us have chosen to study economics so as to acquire a deep understanding of the economic phenomena with which the citizens of  today are confronted. But the teaching that is offered, that is to say for the most part neoclassical theory or approaches derived from it,  does not generally answer this expectation. Indeed, even when the theory legitimately detaches itself from contingencies in the first instance,  it rarely carries out the necessary return to the facts. The empirical side (historical facts, functioning of institutions , study of the behaviors  and strategies of the agents . . . ) is almost nonexistent. Furthermore, this gap in the teaching, this disregard for concrete realities, poses an  enormous problem for those who would like to render themselves useful to economic and social actors."

    The real world is complex and science is about decomposing it into simple phenomena in order to understand them and explain them. This cannot be done without a theory that tells us what we should expect to observe under what circumstances. The theory itself has to be understood and as long as it is not it is a waste of time to talk about the issues of the real world. To learn the theory one first has to learn its methods and then how to apply it to simple examples. These examples will inevitably be very stylized relative to real-world problems. This may sound disappointing but I do not see a better alternative. Similarly, an undergraduate course of fluid mechanics is pretty remote from the design of a nuclear plant, and it is hard to apply the law of gravitation to predict the outcome of a judo match. It is important to motivate the analysis with real-world examples; but, as we shall see below,  the students want to go much further than that. In essence, they are questioning the basic scientific method of insulating and simplifying phenomena, and proposing some dubious criteria in order to select which part of modern economics should be taught.

    The students are right to point out that the empirical side should not be neglected. It would be stupid to deny that. But, in modern economic analysis, empirics is not about historical facts or the functioning of institutions, but about formal statistical evidence on relationships derived from models, tested and estimated using the mathematical techniques of econometrics. And to understand such evidence and assess its validity, it is important to have studied econometrics and statistics. So we are back to mathematics! I would not go as far as saying that knowing history and institutions is useless; but it is useful to an economist only if he has learned to reason as an economist. This should be the central goal of our teaching.

    I do agree that the theories should be validated by evidence. If this is not done in the classroom, it may be because of pedagogical problems but not because such evidence does not exist.  But I am not sure whether the students who signed the petition would be more willing to accept the evidence than the theories. For example, are they willing to accept the conclusions of the above mentioned INSEE-study, against which the unions petitioned?
 

3. Pluralism.

        Many of the students who complained were first exposed to a traditional French style of doing economics, based on commenting ancient texts and describing institutions. The scientific approach has been a shock to them.
        This traditional style is still epitomized by the French agregation contest, which one has to take to become a university professor. This contest puts considerable emphasis on institutions and history of economic thought, not so much on modern economic analysis, and very little on being a good researcher with a good publication record in international journals. It traditionally includes a silly "rite de passage", whereby a candidate has to give a lecture on any topic, of which he or she is informed 24 hours in advance. Most of the work is to gather a team of people who are spread across various university libraries and have to write, as quickly as they can, reviews of the few books adressing the topic. Such criteria are biased toward selecting conservative people unlikely to be up-to-date and even less to move the frontiers of knowledge. As a result, French economists of international stature have traditionally been confined to the administration, the grandes ecoles, or the CNRS, but have been absent from the university. Needless to say, many of them are abroad. A recent study ranked French economists on the basis of citations in international journals [5]. Out of the top ten, six are abroad. Of the remaining four, only one is a university professor, and he is a Harvard Ph.D. who personifies the kind of economics that the students complain about. By chance, things were progressively changing under the impulse of a few dynamic research centers within some universities, and French university economists were at last starting to publish in international journals. It is this painful path to excellence which is being jeopardized.

        But, will you ask, if French university professors are recruited on such criteria, how come that they teach mathematical economics? The answer is that most of them don't. In fact, most economics in France is taught in the fashion that these students petitioners advocate. The students' petition was followed by a petition by 200 professors, i.e. a substantial fraction of the profession, who, unless they are schizophrenic, should not teach the 'dominant' theories. The student's petition originated from one of the undergraduate programmes which insists on the quantitative methods of modern economic analysis; but such programmes are not the majority and the students elected it because it was a good programme associated with a centre of excellence, rather than many others that insist far less on formalism and are more "pluridisciplinary". In other words the students are facing their own contradictions. If you prefer Pepsi-Cola to Coca-Cola, you don't have to drink Coca Cola, nor to demonstrate against it.

    This sheds a new light on the call for "pluralism". The manifestos complain about a so-called "dominant", neo-classical way of doing economics. They write:

"Out of all the approaches to economic questions that exist, generally only one is  presented to us. This approach is suppose to explain everything by means of a purely axiomatic process, as if this were THE economic truth. We do not accept this dogmatism. We want a pluralism of approaches, adapted to the complexity of the objects and to the  uncertainty surrounding most of the big questions in economics (unemployment, inequalities, the place of financial markets, the advantages
          and disadvantages of free-trade, globalization, economic development, etc."

    This 'approach'--which I think has imposed itself precisely because it is not dogmatic-- is indeed dominant in most countries but not in the French university system, and, as I said, there is no scarcity of curricula that correspond to what these students want, starting with the famous "Science-Po" school which trains most top civil servants and many journalists and private sector executives. So by pluralism they don't mean having more freedom to choose what to study, but two things.

    First, diluting the messages of contemporary economic analysis, which insists on incentives and individual selfishness, by mixing them with contradictory messages from other disciplines and approaches. The result will be to prevent students from critically analyzing economic issues and will instead lead them to superpose on it an unconclusive literary discourse. In light of the above mentioned union petition, the objective is to reduce the influence of economics because its predictions are often at variance with dominant views about economic policy in French circles.  When the level of discourse is as low as "pollution permits = permits to kill", or "don't touch pensions", economics or even common sense is unwelcome. So called "neo-classical" economics has in fact a clear message on many of the real-world issues mentioned. Like: globalization benefits consumers, the common agricultural policy is inefficient,  financial markets helps people and firms to hedge against risk, unemployment is higher when unions are more powerful and unemployment spells longer under strict employment protection legislation, economic development is fostered by well enforced property rights on assets, etc. Furthermore, it has the power of qualifying these messages by examining the effect of different assumptions regarding technology, tastes, information, and institutions.

    Second, more "pluralism" means more jobs for "alternative" approaches: institutionalists, neo-marxists, and so on, and less jobs for "orthodox" economists. I will refrain from making value judgements about the quality of the research produced by each category. But the "orthodox" submit their research to international journals with a stringent review process by acknowledged specialists, while the "alternatives" typically publish in French journals that reject far fewer papers. If they prevail, more good economists will have to leave the country, and French intellectual life will be even more entrenched and provincial, an inevitable recipe for mediocrity. It is a bit as if the French soccer federation decided to change the rules of the game, just for France. Would we be World Champions?

4. What they propose:

    Finally, in order to make their point most clearly, the students have proposed a curriculum in three parts which would restore the teaching of economics in France as  it was in 1945. [This curriculum is described in Box 1 below] There is a descriptive block which depicts French and International economic institutions, starting of course with its majesty the State, and concludes by describing the economy. It has no room for thinking and analysis, and is not transferable:  the organigram of a given  institution is a piece of knowledge that can only be applied to that particular institution, not to other problems. In contrast, one should insist on teaching methods of analysis that can apply to variety of issues, including issues that have not arised yet.
    The second block is the unavoidable History of economic thought part, which familiarizes people with economics as it was in the past.  This is a tribute to the literary tradition in the discipline, but a denial that progress has been made and that the old ideas that have not proven false nor inconsistent are now embodied in the analysis in a way much more coherent, precise and explicit about underlying assumptions.
    Modern economics is therefore confined to the third block, which, according to the students, should be taught in a case study style on the basis of contemporary issues. A striking feature is that there is no reference to any advance that was made after say 1960. However, the issues proposed are interesting and relevant: privatisation of health insurance, the effect of tradable pollution permits, etc. But, to be able to address these problems, you need to be very comfortable with economic analysis. And this takes a lot of work.  I fail to see how the reading of Marx or knowledge of the organigram of a French ministry can be of any help to answer such questions.
    What the students  are proposing, far from a reform, is in fact a regression to a situation where economics is not an autonomous discipline but a literary discourse at the cross roads between humanities and law. The next step would be to stop teaching it altogether and to lump it into some "general contemporary culture" curriculum. In fact, some of their  supporters are quite close to such a conclusion. For example, one of them, in the newspaper Le Monde, writes: "most of neoclassical microeconomics should be taught in the context of history of economic thought, along with the marxist theory of work-value or other theories of value, and should be excluded from freshmen and sophomore years "[6]. Of course, it is pure nonsense to lump the centerpiece of modern economics with obsolete theories more than a century old. And the author, who does not know what to teach instead, advocates that "alternative manuals" should be written. Why hasn't he done it already?

These attacks constitute the best proof of the relevance and importance of economics. You don't make ennemies if you are useless.

(from http://www.paeecon.net)
 

[1] Examples: Viviane Forrester's L'horreur economique, Une étrange dictature;  Attac Contre la dictature des marchés  Syllepse;  Albert  Jacquard,  J'accuse l'économie triomphante Lgf ;

[2] Examples include Bernard Maris, Lettre ouverte aux gourous de l'économie qui nous prennent pour des imbéciles, Albin Michel, 1999; Laurent Cordonnier,   Pas de pitié pour les gueux, Raison

[3] See Bernard Girard, "Quand les économistes veulent enchainer la démocratie", Les Temps Modernes, janvier-février 1998, and my answer: "Les économistes ont-ils une aversion pour la démocratie ? "; Les Temps Modernes, 600, Juillet 1998, 185-193

[4] See "Une étude sur le chômage met le feu aux poudres à l'Insee" La Tribune - 2 août 2000.

[5] Pierre-Philippe Combes and Stéphane Linnemer, "La publication d'articles de recherche en économie en France, une approche par les citations", CERAS working paper 00-04, Tableau 9, page 16, col.2.

[6] See Jean Gadrey, "Enseigner l'économie : quel sens ?", Le Monde, 12 décembre 2000.