Why economics textbooks must, and how they can, be changed into a real-world and pluralist economics. The example of a fundamentally new complexity-economics micro-textbook

Wolfram Elsner

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We argue that economics must, and can, be taught in fundamentally different ways than the simplistic and ideology-laden “economics of x”. We illustrate this with a fundamentally new textbook, “Microeconomics of Complex Economies” (2015). The mainstream’s ambivalence between some relevant research and its simplistic teaching in terms of “optimum”, “equilibrium”, and “market”, and the resulting textbook structure, incoherent between the static and “optimal” equilibrium and some reference to more recent real-world phenomena, will be characterized. We show how this can be changed by showing the process of getting a “heterodox” complexity textbook published, and by the structure of its content.

Keywords: microeconomics; textbooks; teaching economics; heterodoxy; complexity economics; evolutionary economics; institutional economics; game theory; computational economics; history of economic thought. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 A20 B00 C63 C70 D00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-08-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:73097

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