#25.3 AES26 Making Space, Valuing Place: Day 3 - A Genuine Time, and a Great Debate.

Good afternoon.

My name is George.

I'm a recovering economist.

It's been 10 years since I drew this five-demand

curve.

And it's part of my therapy.

I'm here to tell you how not to become like economics and why evaluation should adopt pluralism and remain pluralistic.

If we think about and look at what happened with economics way back when, it used to be a very pluralistic approach

to the study of what we'll speak or political economy.

different sorts of thought, different methodologies, different ideologies, a whole range of things, something that was much more useful.

But then economics crawled up its own

and

got rid of that diverse.

One model took over.

A very narrow set of methods predominated in how they looked at the world.

Interestingly, and it might seem contradictory to the argument we're trying to make, is it actually increased its external influence.

But whether it did it in a positive way in the way we define external influence is a good question.

I think we can learn a lot from that cautionary tale about what happened with economics and its shift from pluralism to a much more homogenous way of looking at the world and applying its knowledge to the world, and something that evaluators should not guard against but actively resist.

And I think we actually see it in evaluation when it comes to doing economic evaluation.

You get the economists that come in and say, we've got to do a cost-benefit analysis.

That's the way you do economic evaluation.

Luckily,

we can resist that because we have a rule of

approach, a range of methods we can adopt to doing economic evaluation, such as Julian E's barely for money approach, there's a whole range of other approaches.

And I think that's what we