From the Editors

We have received three interesting and informative letters in response to the Editorial in the previous issue (June 30, 2010). See our new section, Letters to the Editors, in the Newsletter. As indicated by Marco Novarese, the Director of NEP (New Economics Papers), the issue of "Publishing, Ranking, and the Future of Heterodox Economics" was analytically discussed by notable heterodox economists in the special issue of On the Horizon (2008). We urge you to take a close look at alternative and effective ways to make heterodox economic researches more visible and accessible.

In a slightly different line, we would like call your attention to recently published two working papers on how a government-driven research assessment can negatively affect heterodox economic research. To quote Harry Bloch:

There is a large and growing community of heterodox economic scholars producing a substantial body of interesting and important research. Yet, the advent of a national research evaluation under ERA [Excellence in Research in Australia] poses great challenges to this community. The output of heterodox economics research will be woefully understated and heterodox economists are likely to be undercounted. When the output is counted it will be as part of the "other economics" classification, which is likely to achieve a poor performance score. Thus, heterodox economics will be further marginalized and tarnished with a low quality reputation (pp. 12-3).

The evidence of growing heterodox economics is found right here in the Newsletter. As usual, this issue contains many interesting calls for papers, conferences and workshops, job postings, and new books. I (Jo) should mention (since I'm participating) that there will be a workshop on "Social Provisioning, Embeddedness, and Modeling the Economy" organized by the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (and Fred Lee) in September. Check this out!

One last note: As we have announced earlier, we are in the process of updating the Heterodox Economics Directory. We assume that there are schools, journals, associations, websites, etc that are useful, but not yet listed in the Directory, for the heterodox economics community. If you have such an information item, please send it us by the end of August.

In solidarity,

Tae-Hee Jo and Ted Schmidt, Editors

Email: heterodoxnews@gmail.com

Website: http://heterodoxnews.com