ahe meth workshop

> Dear All,
>
> I would like to spread around some holiday cheer by giving you a brief summary of the Association for Heterodox Economics 2nd Post-Graduate Training Workshop: "Getting From Hypotheses to Conclusions: Advanced Methods for Pluralist and Interdisciplinary Economics Research" that took place at the University of Manchester, December 9-11, 2002. Wendy Olsen organized the Workshop and did a really great job. The first speaker was Paul Downward who gave a great talk on econometrics, applied heterodox research, and critical realism as well as a couple of snide comments directed at me. Following Paul, Steve Fleetwood gave a presentation on critical realism and labor market theory. As usual the students found Steve very interesting and entertaining. Steve also puts what he says into action. In the evening after the presentations for the day were over, Steve took many of the students on an applied Critical Realist walk--first he showed them how to be CRITICAL of the mass produced beer found at many pubs, and
then introduced them to REAL(ist) Ale at a REAL(ist) pub. So we all sat around for a couple of hours talking economics and shooting the bull. After I gave a talk on the method of grounded theory, Vassilis Monastiriotis (a student at the previous year's workshop as well as a student at the AFEE 2001 summer school) gave a presentation/survey of regression models and the multi-causal approach which generated lots of questions. Wendy Olsen complemented his presentation with presentations on qualitative methods, on path analysis and multilevel analysis, on advantages of using multi-method research strategies, and on statistical applications integrating qualitative or multi-level analysis with regression--and she introduced the students to a number of software packages to help do all of this. Victoria Chick gave a very stimulating talk on open systems and their implications and then spent much of her evening talking with students about their research. Wendy will be putting much of the material given out and
pr
www.hetecon.com--so check it out in January. There were sixteen students/participants from around the UK and Portugal at the Workshop and many of them really enjoyed it and enjoyed talking with the presenters.
>
> All in all it was a quite successful venture--thanks Wendy for putting in all the work to make the Workshop happen and happen successfully. Paul Downward will be requesting money for the ESRC to put on the Workshop next year at Staffordshire University. It is the only Workshop for economists where students get something different than bog-standard econometrics as research tools in economics and all heterodox economists should support it as well as establish something like it in their local.
>
> Fred Lee
>
Received on Thu Dec 19 17:22:45 2002