Beyond Misbehaving: Changing Universities, Pluralism, and the Evolution of a Heterodox Behavioral Economist

This fascinating book is both an intellectual autobiography and a self-help career guide for academic economists. It tells, in a good-humoured way, a cautionary tale about the career arc of its recently-retired author, set against the backdrop of an evolving university environment that increased the challenges faced by academic economists who deviate from the mainstream. It is a deeply reflective, tell-all account, in which the author does not hold back from analysing his own role in how he under-achieved despite earning a double-first at Cambridge, being willing to switch countries to advance his career, having an unshakable work ethic and spending four decades working in behavioral economics, an area that eventually became very popular. It explains how the author began to work in this area around the same time as the 2017 Nobel Laureate, Richard Thaler, but went down a very different, much more radical pathway as a behavioral economist, a pathway that has resulted in an approach that should appeal to many heterodox economists as well as offering wider opportunities for those who have previously known only Thaler-style behavioral economics.

Beyond Misbehaving yields many career lessons and will be especially valuable to early-career behavioral and/or heterodox economists who want to understand how, and why, the way that academic career games need to be played has changed over the past half-century. Along the way, it provides a student’s perspective on what it was like to study economics at the University of Cambridge in the 1970s, both as an undergraduate and as a research student. It explores, via the author’s experience over four decades, the challenges of teaching economics in a pluralistic way, how the author sought to deal with them, and why they have become increasingly acute. Via the author’s extensive experience in PhD administration, the book explores the challenges that research students must be able to deal with and the role that best-practice PhD management systems play in reducing risks of non-submission or having to revise and resubmit doctoral dissertations. It shares senior-level experience on what heterodox economists need to do to survive and prosper in a world of research audits that favour their mainstream rivals - including the importance of being mindful about the psychology of being a scholar and pursuing promotion. It also provides much food for thought about what can be entailed if one moves to academic positions ’Down Under’, a very long way from one’s roots.

The book opens with a foreword by John Creedy, Professorial Fellow in Economics at the University of Melbourne. Further advance praise has been given by Geoffrey Hodgson, Emeritus Professor of Management at the London campus of Loughborough University and Founding/Managing editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics. On reading the original draft, he commented as follows:

"I thoroughly enjoyed reading Beyond Misbehaving. A great title for a great memoir. It is an enticing read (at least) for economists in our generation and for dissident economists more generally. For me, the strengths of the book are in your accounts of your undergraduate and postgraduate experiences at Cambridge and in your musings on your employments at various universities. These are really informative, they put lots of important things on the record, and they carry bits of advice (including warnings), as you make clear throughout and at the end of the book. Great stuff."

Peter E. Earl is an Honorary Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland, Australia.