My latest book is Beyond Misbehaving: Changing Universities, Pluralism, and the Evolution of a Heterodox Behavioural Economist. It was published in January 2024 in ebook and paperback formats and is available from outlets such as such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Smashwords, etc Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
Beyond Misbehaving is both my intellectual autobiography and a self-help career guide. It provides a deeply introspective tell-all account of a life spent as a non-mainstream economist working in universities in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It explains how I began to work in the field of behavioural economics around the same time as the 2017 Nobel Laurate, Richard Thaler, but went down a very different, much more radical pathway than he did as a behavioural 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 behavioural economics.
Beyond Misbehaving yields many career lessons and will be especially valuable to early-career behavioural 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 my experience over four decades, the challenges of teaching economics in a pluralistic way, how I sought to deal with them, and why they have become increasingly acute. It explores the challenges that research students must be able to deal with and the role that modern PhD management systems play in reducing risks of non-submission or having to revise and resubmit doctoral dissertations, in sharp contrast to how things were when today’s senior academics were early-career researchers. 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.
As a teaser, material from the preface and the introduction to Beyond Misbehaving is available here.
Supplementary Material Extracted from the Original Draft of Beyond Misbehaving
The original draft of Beyond Misbehaving included almost 30,000 words of material that is not in the published version of the book. I removed the material because it made the original version read more like a memoir rather than purely an intellectual autiobiography and self-help guide. However, those who enjoy the book may find the deleted material fascinating and reazlie that it complements areas of the book in a variety of ways. I have edited the deleted material into three papers that are available here:
Lifestyles of a Heterodox Behavioural Economist As the author of Lifestyle Economics, I initially could not resist the temptation to include sections on my lifestyle experiences in Cambridge, Stirling, Hobart, Christhcurch and Brisbane, the cities in which I lived after leaving school and beginning my life as an academic. That material, originally presented in sections in five of the chapters of Beyond Misbehaving, had been brought together here in this paper, and some photographs have been added. This chapter-length paper complements the ‘Moving Down Under’ section of the final ‘Career Lessons’ chapter of Beyond Misbehaving.
Anecdotes, Extensions, and Deleted Footnotes This long paper contains additoinal material originially included in Chapters 1–3, 5–9. It is organized to follow the chapter structure of Beyond Misbehaving, with subheadings that indicate how it relates to particular sections of the chapter in question. There is much here that has a lighter side than the book itself, or which provides more background to things covered in the book.
Who Do I Think I Am? This paper contains family history material that goes well beyond the material in Chapter 1 of Beyond Misbehaving. It should be of interest to those who enjoy TV programs from the ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ franchise, most of which I was completely unaware of until recently and is on a par with the kinds of discoveries revealed in such programmes.
Other Supplementary Material
Entry for the 1976 Adam Smith Essay Competition (Referred to at the end of section 3.4.)
The ‘less substantial’ substantial piece of work: ‘A Keynesian Approach to Structural Change’ (Referred to in section 4.4.)
Peter E. Earl (1995) Coordination problems in tertiary education and research, paper presented at the G.B. Richardson Colloquium, St John’s College, Oxford, 4–6 January (First referred to in footnote 4 of section 4.4.)
First PhD Proposal (Referred to in section 4.4.)
Peter E. Earl (1978) On Some Fallacies in Hayek’s Critique of Keynesf (Unpublished paper, referred to in section 4.4.)
Secomd PhD Proposal (Referred to in section 4.4.)
Peter E. Earl (1981) J. M. Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: A Guide for Readers (Referred to in section 5.2)
Peter E. Earl (1980) Pricing policies in retailing and manufacturing business. (Referred to in sectoin 5.3 in the discussin of extenal service: this paper was written for a conferences of high school economics teachers hosted by the University of Stirling. I used the occasion to introducem to the ‘normal cost’ pricing ideas of P.W.S Andres and Elizabeth Brunner, attempting to show how they differed from the view of pricing in theories of imperfect/monopolistic competition._
Peter E. Earl (1980) Characteristic filtering: Towards a behavioural theory of individual choice’, University of Stirling Discussion Papers in Economics, Finance, and Investment, No. 84, August. (Referred to in section 5.4.)
Peter E. Earl (1981) A Behavioural Theory of Economists’ Behaviour and the Lack of Success of Behavioural Economics (The Much Too Long Version) (This is an extended version of the similarly-titled 1980 University of Stirling Discussion Paper in Economics, Finance, and Investment, No. 85, referred to in Section 5.4; it was eventually cut down to the version that appeared as ‘A Behavioral Theory of Economists Behavior’ in A. S. Eichner (ed.) (1983) Why Economics is Not Yet a Science, London, Macmillan.)
The Original Draft of Chapter 6 of The Economic Imagination. (Referred to in sectin 5.4.)
Peter E. Earl (1984) Current Thoughts on Decision Processes (This is a six-page position paper that I wrote for the ESRC Workshop on Economic Beliefs at the University of Bath in early 1984, to which I refer in section 5.5.)
Peter E. Earl and Keith W. Glaister (1980) Wage Stickiness from the Demand Side (Referred to in detail in section 5.6.)
Set of Lecture summaries and other material for my University of Tasmania unit on Australian Political Economy. (101MB pdf file) (Referred to in section 6.2.)
Peter E. Earl (1987) Scientific research programmes, corporate strategies and the theory of the firm’, Information Research Unit Occasional Paper, University of Queensland. (Referred to in Section 6.6.)
Peter E. Earl (1988) Information, transaction costs, and the economic analysis of financial firms’. Information Research Unit Occasional Paper, University of Queenslanad. (Referred to in section 6.6.)
Peter E. Earl (1996) Economics and Marketing; A Survey (Unpublished paper referred to in section 7.6.)
Peter E. Earl -- Eclectic Real-World Economics 