Recent trends in economics
The post-war boom in Australian economics came to a crashing end in the late 1980s amidst a furious recoil at the retreat from the traditional Deakinite formulae of protection, labour regulation and state finance.
This outraged reaction to the negation of old verities had parallels in other economies at the time, but in Australia it had a particular vehemence (see Coleman and Hagger, 2001). It was doubtless in sympathy with the scapegoating of economists that enrolments in economics began to shrink sharply. This was reinforced by a switch of students in the late 1980s to new more crudely vocational courses in ‘business'. Thus the utilitarianism that had fed Australian economics was now withering it. Inevitably, this decline in student numbers was followed by the abolition of several economics departments and the total elimination of distinct departments of economic history.At the same time as the casting of economists as a bugaboo by the rallied defence of the Deakinite project there arrived ‘globalisation'. This produced a surge in enrolments that was vast at the graduate level. Whereas PhDs in the post-war period were a sprinkle, now departments established PhD assembly lines powered by foreign aid scholarships. Globalisation also revolutionised appointments. In the post-war years ‘appointments from overseas were made cautiously' (Schedvin, 1978, 145) and sometimes grudgingly: in the 1950s John Harsanyi was denied promotion to Senior Lecturer by the University of Queensland, despite two papers in the Journal of Political Economy, one in Econometrica and one in the Review of Economic Studies. From the 1990s hiring directly from the United States became almost de rigeur for more highly ranked universities. This provoked complaints of ‘Americanisation' (Gronewegen and McFarlane, 1990). But this term misrepresents the phenomenon; for the fields that are most resonant of American ideals — Law and Economics and Public Choice — have had little success in Australia.
What Australia has absorbed in full measure is an ‘international style'; a kind of economics that has no nationality, and looks the same wherever it is found across the world.Both the anathemas of anti-economics and the enticements of globalisation operate in the same direction; to weaken Australian economics. One symptom is the struggles of the Economic Society of Australia to retain the engagement of academics, and its displacement by the Econometric Society. Another is the decline of text books with a significant Australian orientation. In the 1970s a genuine and careful adaptation was made of Samuelson, giving full recognition to Australian economics (Millmow, 2011). In the 1980s this text was not re-issued, but instead supplanted by adaptations of other US texts that were sometimes crude ‘find and replace' operations. A third symptom would be the vanishing of Australian presence in international economics, once a stronghold of Australians. A co-editor of the Journal of International Economics was once quoted as saying ‘All Aussies are good at trade theory' (Kenyon, 1992). Who would say that today? Perhaps the final ‘proof' would be the seeming impossibility today of producing a ‘Survey of Australian Economics' as was done a generation ago. In Australia today there is economics aplenty. But there is no Australia in economics any longer. Australian economics is at an end.