cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/44654269
What do economics students learn – beyond models and methods?
This new study examines how economics education shapes students’ beliefs, biases, and openness to competing ideas. Drawing on a large randomised controlled experiment with economics students across 10 countries, the authors investigate how exposure to different framings and forms of “authority” in economics can influence students’ confidence, conformity, and willingness to engage critically with alternative perspectives.
The findings point to a deeper challenge facing economics education today: when mainstream authority is privileged and the discipline is taught as singular, neutral, and closed to contestation, students can be steered toward ideological narrowness – and away from critical inquiry, debate, and pluralism.
Excerpts from the report:
Educational processes in economics— including curricula, pedagogies, disciplinary norms, and broader mechanisms of academic socialization—play a central role in reproducing and legitimizing the field’s narrow intellectual boundaries. Drawing on a novel randomized controlled experiment involving 2,735 economics students across 10 countries, this study provides systematic empirical evidence of how students are conditioned to internalize the ideological and authority frameworks embedded in mainstream economics. We show that economics education does more than simply excluding alternative perspectives: it conditions students to associate credibility not with the substance of an idea, but with the perceived authority and ideological alignment of its source, often unconsciously. This conditioning normalizes and naturalizes a narrow “economics” mindset, fosters deference over critical inquiry, marginalizes alternative perspectives, and reinforces the illusion of neutrality and value-freeness at the heart of the discipline.
The role of ideology in economics has long been the subject of critical debate. A central contention in this literature is that mainstream economics, though often portrayed as objective and ideology-free, is shaped by powerful yet concealed ideological underpinnings, interpretive frameworks, and institutional practices4 (e.g., Avsar, 2011; Chang, 2014; Fine & Milonakis, 2009; Fullbrook, 2008; Galbraith, 1989; Javdani & Chang, 2023; Krugman, 2009; Kvangraven & Kesar, 2023; Rodrik, 2015; Romer, 2015; Stiglitz, 2002; Thompson, 1997). By monopolizing the terms of inquiry through a monolithic ideological apparatus, mainstream economics systematically marginalizes competing perspectives—such as feminist, ecological, Post-Keynesian, Marxist, and (old) institutional economics—that emphasize the broader economic, social, and environmental consequences of market-centric thinking rooted in a naturalized view of the market.
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By providing systematic empirical evidence that exposes the mechanisms of ideological conformity, deference to authority, and the exclusion of alternative perspectives within economics education, we move beyond abstract critique—important as that remains— to reveal how ideology is operationalized and reproduced in practice. In doing so, we contribute to growing debates, both within the discipline and in broader public and policy arenas, calling for a more pluralistic, reflexive, and socially responsive economics (e.g., Carthcart & Nelson, 2024; Cœuré, 2014; Dow, 2017; Falk & Andre, 2021; Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2017; Katsomitro & Writer, 2024; The Guardian, 2024; Wolf, 2019).
Our findings provide compelling evidence that students’ evaluations of economic ideas are significantly biased by the ideological orientation and mainstream status of the sources to which those ideas are attributed. Specifically, when a statement’s attribution is switched from a mainstream to a non-mainstream source, or removed entirely, students’ agreement with the content declines substantially. This pattern suggests that rather than engaging critically with the substance of arguments, students rely heavily on perceived authority and ideological alignment to assess validity. Notably, this tendency persists even though 67 percent of students claim that they evaluate ideas based on content alone. The effects are especially pronounced among PhD students—nearly twice as large—indicating a deepening of ideological conformity associated with prolonged exposure to mainstream economics, as well as self-selection mechanisms that reinforce conformity by filtering out those who fail to adopt the dominant posture—what it means to “think like an economist.”