Disciplinary differentiation and institutional independence: a viable template for a pluralist economics

This paper surveys the teaching of pluralist economics in Australian universities with a particular focus on explaining growth and decline. The paper also presents the results of a survey of staff teaching pluralist economics to assess their background and views on the state of economics teaching. The key finding of our survey is that the most promising pathway to a genuinely pluralist economics appears to be disciplinary differentiation and institutional independence: disciplinary differentiation by teaching a pluralist economics under the subject 'political economy', and institutional independence by basing teaching in faculties of arts and social science away from economics departments and business faculties.