Uneven economic development: identifying the blind spots of mainstream economics

Erik Reinert ()

Chapter 1 in A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development, 2023, pp 19-45 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter describes 10 important blind spots in neo-classical economics which - one by one and added together - in contrast to what mainstream theory predicts make economic change into an uneven process. In many cases the contrasts to today's assumptions are found in the Renaissance experience-based understanding of economics, as with Giovanni Botero (c. 1544-1617). Language is also discussed, and the limits of mathematics in providing qualitative understanding (German: verstehen) is emphasised. In the opening page of his 1940 Harvard dissertation Paul Samuelson - later the most influential economist of the post WWII era - made an important statement: 'Mathematics is a language.' With this new way of expressing economic knowledge, the best universities in USA changed their foreign language policy to allow mathematics to fulfill one of the foreign language requirements for Ph. D. candidates in economics. The chapter finishes by contrasting differences between Renaissance-type experience-based economics - what we call The Other Canon - and standard mainstream economics on 26 concrete issues.

Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788976541/9781788976541.00007.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:18717_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().