If economics is a science, it must play by science’s rules

Practitioners and funders cannot just cherry-pick the bits they like, writes Ehsan Masood introducing a special issue on economics funding and assessment.

This issue of Research Fortnight is inspired in part by the worldwide student campaign to rethink how economics is taught in universities, and by the experiences of researchers sympathetic to these students’ aims.

This is a movement co-founded by Joe Earle, who blames successive rounds of evaluation for a narrowing of UK economics. At a time when world leaders were struggling to stabilise national and global financial systems, Earle and some brave fellow students asked their professors at the University of Manchester why the curriculum was silent on the causes of the crisis of 2008.