The Predicament of Economics (and the social sciences more generally)

Fellow Lecture by Sanjay G. Reddy (Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research, Fellow of the Cluster of Excellence „The Formation of Normative Orders”) on 23rd July 2019

The lecture straddles the methodology, the sociology and politics of social science to ask how and why it is that the discipline of economics, looked to in order to provide answers to pressing questions of social explanation and of policy, often fails to do so in a manner that many could consider to be satisfactory, and is instead seemingly characterized by permanent internal conflicts, the reign of ideology, fads and fashions, and some notable predictive and explanatory failures. The lecture explores the forces and factors operating on the discipline to deflect or prevent it from better serving its social mission and explores the predicament of economists, asking whether certain debates can ever reasonably expected to be resolved or whether their continuation is a manifestation of politics in another form. If there is a way forward that might permit the discipline to become both more reason-bound and more faithful to society, what is it?

Presented by:
The Cluster of Excellence „The Formation of Normative Orders”