The purpose of this essay is to give my own perspective about what is wrong with the Chinese higher education and what is needed. From my perspective, and I believe I speak for many, if we are to truly understand our economy, we need to go beyond what is presented in the texts; to go beyond...

In this paper, we outline a number of features of an interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach to economics. As a suitable example of how an interdisciplinary cooperation can unfold, we focus attention on the relations between institutional economics and psychoanalysis. In the first part of the...

Along with significant economic growth since 1980, economics major concentrations and economics students have proliferated in Chinese universities. But China has imported western mainstream economics without adjustment for China's unique cultural and economic conditions. This paper questions...

In 1985 the Department of Economics at Dickinson College USA, a private four year liberal arts college, embarked upon a bold but promising reform of its economics programme placing it on the cutting edge of what is now called 'pluralist economics education'. This new approach to the philosophy...

This article draws on more than three decades of experience in teaching a pluralist introduction to economics at the University of Sydney, Australia. It focuses particularly on the teaching of 'economics as a social science', the foundation unit of study that lays the basis for a full programme...

Barone's 1991 essay stimulated a debate in our economics department. Two department members at the time, Yngve Ramstad and Richard McIntyre, proposed to reorganise the undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree to emphasise contending perspectives. When this proposal was rejected, Ramstad then...

The need for quantifying human capital emerged naturally with its use in economic research, but so did problems of measurement. The objective of this article is to analyse the most common difficulties in quantifying and defining human capital. This paper will offer a qualitative survey of the...