Introduction

The idea for this volume emerged one morning on the Northern Line of the London Underground, when we were stuck as usual somewhere between Mornington Crescent and Euston. Having exhausted the slender resources of The Sporting Life and The Times Higher Education Supplement, our conversation returned to a familiar theme, namely the way in which we economists are misunderstood by our fellow academics, our students and the general public. There were, we agreed, two popular stereotypes of economists which, while probably contradictory, were frequently adhered to simultaneously by our critics. On the one hand, economists are seen as a bunch of blinkered reactionaries whose only concern is to assert the primacy of pecuniary motives in the determination of people’s behaviour. All practitioners of the discipline are thought of as holding a commitment to the view that human possibilities are narrowly constrained within the limits of a particular institutional form — an idealised private enterprise capitalism — deviations from which can rarely be justified or even considered. Despite the general concurrence on this position, however, it is equally firmly held on the other hand that, when practical advice is required, economists immediately dissolve into a babble of conflicting assertions and assessments. Five economists in a room can easily produce half-a-dozen opinions on the matter in hand.