By Jonathan B. Wight

John Kay is someone to be admired for his quirky ideas about economics and business management, most notably “obliquity”—the notion that to best achieve a goal means pursuing it indirectly.

Yet he is not a fan of heterodoxy, which he finds to be “flaky, the creation of people with their own political agenda, whether Marxist or neoliberal; or of those who cannot do the mathematics the dominant rational choice paradigm requires.”  Heterodoxy is equated with “creationism.”

Yet in the same article Katy adopts his own version of heterodoxy, claiming that economics is not a particular method of rational maximization but an exploration in eclectic pragmatism:

“The subject of economics is not a method of rational choice analysis but a set of problems – the problems that drew students to the subject in the first place. The proper scope of economics is any and all ideas that bear usefully on these topics: just as the proper scope of medicine is any and all therapies that help the patient.”

I guess bad heterodoxy to John Kay is in the eye of the beholder: you’ll know it when you see it.