Diversity in the Moral Sciences

Abstract

Pete Boettke’s “What Is Still Wrong with the Austrian School of Economics?” sketches a program for Austrian economics based on a Kuhnesque analysis of scientific communities. His core recommendations focus on what we might call the Uptake and Diffusion dimensions of the scientific enterprise. If taken as a core commitment, they entail an Integrationist program, a concomitant of which is a reduction in the unique insights of the Austrian approach and, so, an overall reduction of the diversity of perspectives in political economy and moral sciences. A cost of this program is to decrease the diversity of perspectives in economics, which in turn decreases the ability of Republic of Economic Science to explore and solve a wider variety of problems. The author presents the “Fundamental Diversity Dilemma,” according to which there is a trade-off between uptake/plausibility and diversity: as we increase uptake and plausibility, we decrease diversity. The author concludes with a defense of the role of heterodox research programs, and questioning the focus on a small set of metrics to indicate excellent and important research.