Fourth Annual Women in Macroeconomics Conference: Who is the 'individual' in Macroeconomics?

This event will be held on the afternoon of Thursday 9 December 2021; a full programme is available here.

Please Register here

In modern macroeconomics the decision-making agent is unequivocally the individual. If we enquire more about who she or he may be, we are told it is someone with their own tastes and preferences, and that they make their choice in splendid isolation from everyone else. Anything else would be ‘unscientific’. This definition is indiscriminate, untestable and, of course, tells us absolutely nothing about who she or he really is or how they choose.

Feminist economists, such as Nelson (1995, 1996) and Folbre (2009), have long criticised this particular concept of individual, along with the connected notion of so-called ‘objectivity’ that it affords. Their ideas are finally being heard. Most recently, Dasgupta and Goyal (2019) follow a long line of non-mainstream theorists to argue in favour of incorporating a…