Why a School of Political Economy?

The School of Political Economy was established in 2019 to provide high-quality, affordable tertiary-level courses in economics education. The university economics curriculum has long been criticised for its narrowness by students, academics, businesses and society (see for example here, here and here). The poor quality of the curriculum has given rise to a wide range of organisations that are pushing for change (see for example, here, here and here). Despite the ongoing pressure for curricular reform, many departments of economics have been unwilling and/or unable to modernise their subject offerings. Given this, the School of Political Economy has sought to simply bypass a recalcitrant university sector and directly offer the type of tertiary-level courses that many students, academics and others have long been calling for. 

Political Economy versus economics

Political economy is the original name for economics. In many ways it is a more satisfactory name in that it better signals the very close connection between the economic and the political. Political economy also denotes a more pluralist and interdisciplinary way of doing economics. Political economy incorporates standard economics (such as the ‘neoclassical economics’ that continues to dominate economics instruction), but it also goes well beyond it to look at other schools of economic thought such institutional economics, Post-Keynesian economics, Marxist economics, behavioural economics, ecological economics, feminist economics and Austrian economics. A basic principle of instruction is to focus on illuminating the strengths and weaknesses of all competing schools of economic thought rather than on the uncritical exposition of just one school of thought.