Education is increasingly coming under the shadow of economics. In this article we engage in ideology critique by applying a critical realist analysis to conventional economic models and the teaching of students. Through a historical and philosophical interrogation, we argue that the current curriculum suffers from a diminutive understanding of human being. We argue that economics education has for a long time now worked with a highly abstracted and decontextualized idea of human being that has absented other dimensions of human (...) concerns. We examine the current English Advanced level economic curriculum and the revised curriculum which will be taught from September 2015. Using an understanding of the dynamics of structure and agency and that economics operates in open systems, we argue for retroduction as an appropriate methodology. (shrink)

Behavioral intervention techniques leveraging reactive responses have gained popularity as tools for promoting ethical behavior. Choice architects, for example, design and present default opt-out options to nudge individuals into accepting preselected choices deemed beneficial to both the decision-maker and society. Such interventions can also employ mild financial incentives or affective triggers including joy, fear, empathy, social pressure, and reputational rewards. We argue, however, that ethical competence is achieved via reflection, and that heavy reliance on reactive behavioral interventions can undermine the (...) development of ethical competence over the long term. Specifically, drawbacks may occur through motivational displacement, dependency, moral crowding out, loss of personal autonomy, and reactance. We introduce complementary cognitive boosting techniques designed to stimulate reflective cognition, as a more promising long-term strategy for instilling ethical behavior. One such approach is the Moral Self-Awareness (MSA) motivational construct, which incrementally leads agents to increasing levels of ethical reflection. We explain why ethical boosting approaches present more edifying and durable alternatives to reactive behavioral interventions and offer suggestions for social and organizational policy. (shrink)

Read Donald Gillies' original paper 'The Empirical Success of Keynesianism'...

A decade after the financial crisis, there is a growing consensus that the neoclassical approach to economics has failed, and that new approaches are needed. This paper argues that economics has been trying to solve the wrong problem. Economics sees itself as the science of scarcity, but instead it should be the science of money. Just as physicists' ideas about quantum matter were formed by studying the exchange of particles at the subatomic level, so economics should begin by analysing the (...) properties of money-based transactions, which like quantum entities have a fundamentally dualistic nature. By building on ideas from quantum money, quantum finance and quantum social science, this paper shows that the economy is an archetypal example of a quantum social system, complete with its own versions of measurement uncertainty, entanglement, and so on. This leads to a proposal for a quantum economics, which is to neoclassical economics what quantum physics is to classical physics. (shrink)