Why a School of Political Economy?

The university economics curriculum has been regularly criticised for its lack of plurality and interdisciplinarity by students, business and society at large. Indeed, in no other academic discipline do students so regularly, and so widely, express deep dissatisfaction with the content of what they are taught. There is ongoing work trying to remedy the situation inside the university system. However, for a range of reasons, the pace of reform is too slow. In response to this unsatisfactory situation, we have established the School of Political Economy to offer the type of courses that universities should be offering but usually do not.  

Political Economy versus economics

Political economy is our preferred term for most of the work we do. We generally prefer the term ‘political economy’ for several reasons, including the fact that it better captures the reality that the political and the economic are often very tightly connected.’ Political economy’ is also an attractive term because it is the original name for economics, and given that much of that early pioneering work was interdisciplinary and pluralist, it is appropriate for our purposes.  

Modern political economy studies the social provisioning process: how society does (and does not) get the goods and services it needs to flourish. Political economy is ‘economics in context’ in that it regularly incorporates the social, political and environmental context in which economic activity occurs. Much work in political economy is progressive in nature, seeking to better understand the world in order to improve it. 

Political economy has common ground with economics in that it studies the production and distribution of goods and services. However, the various schools of political economy adopt a broader and deeper mode of analysis than occurs in much economic analysis. Whilst our primary focus is on the teaching of political economy, we always include some teaching of standard economics in our courses. This is appropriate for a number for several reasons, including that fact that it increases your capacity to assess rival claims about the causes of, and solutions to, various economic and social challenges.