Program prepares students to tackle challenges of a complex world

Stephen Hawking famously predicted in 2000, "I think the next century will be the century of complexity."

Today, the late physicist's words ring true, given the many large, multilayered problems that exist in our world, from climate change and economic inequality to food insecurity and health care disparities. Addressing problems like these, which are mired in social, economic, ethical, and political concerns, will take teams of people working in tandem across disciplines, utilizing complicated technology to navigate a labyrinth of networked systems, experts say.

To equip students with the skills needed to contribute to durable solutions, Johns Hopkins University recently launched a bachelor of arts in moral and political economy through its Center for Economy and Society at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute. The new MPE major, made possible by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, challenges students to investigate and think broadly about the many sides of pressing world problems.

"Individual academic disciplines on their own, whether political science, philosophy, economics, or sociology, are insufficient at tackling some of the biggest challenges of the 21st century," says Glory Liu, the assistant research professor who helped develop the major and serves as assistant director of the Center for Economy and Society. "Our new major teaches students to consider urgent problems in context—that is, in the social, economic, moral, political, and historical contexts in which they emerged and exist."

The program gives students both the flexibility to pursue interests and a structured pathway to graduate with a cohesive experience. It consists of 57 credits that start with a two-semester introductory course, Social Theories of the Economy, followed by courses in macro- and microeconomics, a reading seminar, and a research lab. After these foundational courses, students work with faculty to identify a focus area and take nine electives, four of which must fall within their focus track.

"When we created the program, we intentionally set parameters like focus tracks to guide students to think about a specific problem or set of problems and learn how various disciplines approach it," Liu says.

Image caption: Students take notes in Social Theories of the Economy

Image credit: Will Kirk / Johns Hopkins University

Currently, students can choose from among 10 broad focus tracks, such as borders and migration, land and environment, finance and trade, and technology and innovation. Alternatively, they can propose their own topic.

The program then culminates with a two-semester senior thesis seminar, during which students engage in peer review and other collaborative activities while writing a mandatory thesis related to their focus track.

So far, more than a dozen students have enrolled and are taking courses—and dozens of others have expressed interest. Enrollment requires an application process "designed to make the program selective and limited in size, with room to scale up and grow over time," Liu says. The smaller size, she adds, will allow the program's professors and postdoctoral fellows to work closely with students as they learn the rudiments of research in the social sciences and humanities.

Faculty teaching in the new program include Monica Prasad, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economic and Political Sociology whose three books explore neoliberal policies (such as tax cuts) in the United States, and Louis Hyman, a professor of political economy in the Department of History in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute whose five books delve into the history of capitalism. Additionally, six new postdoctoral fellows will help teach and support undergraduates in the new major, including historian Casey Eilbert and sociologist Mustafa Yavaş, who started this year.

"Conducting research in the social sciences and humanities is rigorous because it involves multiple skill sets," Liu says, referring to the mix of experimental design, statistics, data science, and critical reading and writing that come with it. "Johns Hopkins offers undergraduates robust research opportunities in STEM fields, and this is a chance to involve them in social science and humanities research in ways that prepare them for jobs or graduate school down the road."

Evolving disciplines and approaches

For Liu and her colleagues Simon D. Halliday, associate director of the Center for Economy and Society, and Angus Burgin, an associate professor in the Department of History, the new major comes at an opportune time, as global crises with ethical, social, political, and economic implications evolve or emerge, from deadly wars to record-high human migration.

"Individual disciplines are powerful and give people research tools to generate new knowledge about the world, but they can be narrowing when it comes to big, complicated problems," says Burgin, who earned a doctorate in history from Harvard and specializes in the history of intellectual movements and ideas at the intersection of politics and economics in the United States.

"Historians, for instance, don't typically have sufficient training in economics to engage fully in areas fundamental to economic history, just as economists may lack what they need to engage fully in history, political theory, or philosophy. A goal of the major is to give students foundational tools, methods, and knowledge from various fields in the social sciences and humanities, so they can develop a broader understanding—and take a broader approach—to problem-solving."

Many individual disciplines are expanding their approaches, Burgin, Liu, and Halliday say, including economics. Halliday, for instance, co-wrote a leading economics textbook, Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination (Oxford University Press, 2022), that traces the field's evolution from focusing primarily on profits and wealth generation to one that contributes to the greater good of our world.

Capitalism, the book argues, has led not only to enormous wealth but also rampant inequality. As a result, scholars are investigating how to make the capitalist system work more effectively for everyone—a question broached by Halliday and his co-author Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute and a former professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

"How can a society's institutions—its laws, unwritten rules, and social norms—harness people's pursuit of their own objectives to generate common benefits and to avoid outcomes that none would have chosen?" the authors ask in their book. "The challenge is how to combine freedom—individuals' pursuit of their own objectives—with the common good, improving the livelihoods of all members of society."

Image caption: Glory Liu presents to the class

Image credit: Will Kirk / Johns Hopkins University

For students eager to grapple with hard questions about current world problems, the major in moral and political economy could be a good fit. This semester in the research lab Halliday teaches, People, Power, and Pay: The Economics of the Workplace, his class discusses the recent ban on noncompete agreements by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. "We're looking at whether noncompete agreements were part of the larger trend in monopsonistic practices in the U.S. labor market," Halliday says, referring to the rise in practices thought to disadvantage workers and give employers the upper hand.

Monopsonies aren't new—the British economist Joan Robinson coined the term in 1932—but factors coalesced in the last few decades to make monopsonistic practices more common, especially in regard to hiring decisions, Halliday explains.

"Unlike a monopoly, which involves a single producer or seller, a monopsony is when one person or company is the main buyer of a particular good or service, like a worker's hours of effort," Halliday says. Monopsonistic practices tend to drive down the wage, leaving workers (or producers) underpaid and overworked.

In Halliday's lab, students examine other workplace conditions that can burden employees, such as monitoring technologies that meticulously track how employees spend time at work. "We're reading research that spans economics, business, and public policy, and we're looking at experiments that draw insight and tools from sociology and psychology," Halliday says about the course.

Plenty of room exists for students in the lab (and major) to contribute research findings of their own. "Studies show, for instance, that people tend to care about social norms, and that those norms involve protecting our own interests and displaying concern for other people," Halliday explains. What hasn't been adequately studied, however, and what a student in Johns Hopkins' new program could help investigate, is the degree to which various social norms influence economic-related behaviors, he continues.

"This sort of research veers into experimental and behavioral economics, which looks at what drives people to make decisions, whether it's psychological, cultural, political, or something else," Halliday says. "The work has real-world relevance and appeals to students who want to make a difference."

Modeled on other programs, tailored to students

When Liu, Burgin, and Halliday created the major at Johns Hopkins, they turned to programs with similar goals and curricula, including Oxford University's flagship philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) program; Harvard University's Committee on Degrees in the Social Studies; and the University of California at Berkeley's major in political economy.

Liu majored in political economy at UC-Berkeley as an undergrad before earning a doctorate in political science from Stanford University, then working as a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University's new Center for Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. She went on to teach in Harvard's social studies program for three years and published a book, Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2022), which aims to restore Smith's status as a moral philosopher and overturn his reputation as a self-interested capitalist.

"We looked closely at established programs in politics, philosophy, and economics, borrowing pieces but adapting them to fit our students and leverage existing programs and institutes at Johns Hopkins," Liu says. "Oxford's program, for instance, was created in the 1920s after World War I, largely to train administrators of the [then] British Empire. It offered a rigorous education on classical texts by philosophers like Aristotle and those who came afterward, on up to more recent theoretical texts—all, for the most part, oriented toward statesmanship and economic oversight."

In the past decade, similar programs have proliferated in universities worldwide, Liu says. "One reason is the growing dissatisfaction with economics alone as a discipline," she explains. "Although an economics degree is still highly valued and regarded by academic institutions and consulting firms, among others, recognition is growing that to really understand economic, political, and social problems—and how they're intertwined—economics alone isn't sufficient."

Approximately 80 universities in the U.S. currently offer a version of a PPE degree, according to Forbes, but the requirements vary. "In some programs, students pick and choose courses from wide options in political science, philosophy, and economics, with limited oversight or guidance on how the courses fit together," Liu says. "We wanted our program to offer something intentional."

As the program gets underway, Liu says she looks forward to working with students as they hone the driving questions of their research projects and thesis. "It's much easier to say, 'Hey, I want to research problems with technology and innovation,' but it's much harder to identify what, precisely, to investigate within that expansive area.

"I struggle with that even now as a political scientist. But we're all here to put our heads together and help each other—and to show students that there's a way to bring order out of the chaos and uncertainty of large, looming problems."