The Predicament of Economics (and the social sciences more generally)

Fellow-Lecture

23 July 2019, 2pm

Sanjay G. Reddy (Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research, Fellow of the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders")

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Campus Westend
Gebäude „Normative Ordnungen“, 5.02
Max-Horkheimer-Straße 2

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The lecture straddles the methodology, the sociology and politics of social science to ask how and why it is that the discipline of economics, looked to in order to provide answers to pressing questions of social explanation and of policy, often fails to do so in a manner that many could consider to be satisfactory, and is instead seemingly characterized by permanent internal conflicts, the reign of ideology, fads and fashions, and some notable predictive and explanatory failures. The lecture explores the forces and factors operating on the discipline to deflect or prevent it from better serving its social mission and explores the predicament of economists, asking whether certain debates can ever reasonably expected to be resolved or whether their continuation is a manifestation of politics in another form. If there is a way forward that might permit the discipline to become both more reason-bound and more faithful to society, what is it?

Sanjay G. Reddy is an Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research.  He has also previously taught at Columbia University, and been a visitor at diverse academic institutions in the US, Europe and India.  He has held fellowships  from the Center for Ethics, the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University, the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, the Justitia Amplificata program of the Goethe University of Frankfurt and Free University of Berlin and the Advanced Research Collaborative of the City University of New York.  
Recently he was a member of the Independent High-level Team of Advisers to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations on the longer-term positioning of the UN Development System (in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) and has served in various other functions in the United Nations..  He is one of the co-founders of the Global Consumption and Income Project. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, an M.Phil. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B.  in applied mathematics with physics from Harvard University.
For more information see: http://www.sanjayreddy.com/about
For more information about the fellowship: Click here...

Video:

Presented by:
The Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders"