Assessing economics as a serviceable social science

ESSK 2025 Workshop
Assessing economics as a serviceable social science

University of Helsinki, 22-23 August 2025.

The ESSK (Economics as Serviceable Social Knowledge) project is pleased to invite researchers to the workshop “Assessing economics as a serviceable social science” to be held on-site at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Workshop theme: 

Economics has often been criticized for failing to cope effectively with prominent socioeconomic problems (such as poverty, inequality, and various sustainability challenges) and crises (such as climate and biodiversity crises, the 2008 financial crisis, or the socioeconomic imbalances caused by the Covid-19 pandemic). These issues have led social scientists, the public, and economists themselves, to contest the policy relevance of economics.

The key issue that the workshop addresses is whether economics has the capacities required to meet such contemporary and emerging challenges, or whether it at least has the ability to improve those capacities swiftly enough to avoid perceptions of futility and loss of public trust.

Key topics and questions:
 

I. Understanding policy relevance:

• What is policy relevance and how to assess it?

• Accounts of science-policy interactions.

• External validity and its relation to policy relevance.

• Policy problems and policy goals: their types and complexity.

• The dynamics of the policy process in theory and practice.

II. Models and policymaking:

• Models as tools for reliable policy inferences.

• Models as argumentative devices for policy deliberation.

• The roles of theoretical and empirical models in policy making.

• Varying policy goals and their influence on modelling practices.

III. Evidence and policymaking:

• Methods for producing, interpreting, and assessing evidence for policy purposes.

• What are the trade-offs associated with the use of experimental and observational methods in public policy deliberations?

• How well are the evidential requirements of policymaking matched by the evidence and knowledge produced by scientific economics?

• Synthesis and amalgamation of evidence to achieve policy goals.

IV. Institutional structure of economics:

• Institutional preconditions for a policy relevant economic science.

• The academic and extra-academic image of economics and its implications to policymaking.

• Epistemic justice and responsibility in science-policy interactions.

• Interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and integration in relation to dealing more effectively with socioeconomic policy problems.

• The influence of policy cultures and interests on scientific practice in economics.

The workshop is organized by the ESSK -  Economics as Serviceable Social Knowledge project (funded by the Research Council of Finland), which is based at TINT - Centre for Philosophy of Social Science (University of Helsinki). The workshop will mark the completion of the ESSK project  by providing a venue for intellectual exchange and collaboration, focusing on the serviceability of economics to society and its role as a policy-relevant science. The organizers are also planning to edit a special issue on the topic of the workshop. 

Submission Guidelines:

We invite submission of abstracts (maximum 500 words) clearly stating the research question along with a brief outline of the argument. 

The deadline for submissions is 7 March 2025. 

To submit your abstract please fill in this form: https://forms.gle/nqArKwT7tLyJuHcp8 

Important Dates:

• Deadline for submission: 7 March 2025

• Decisions will be announced by: 20 March 2025

• Workshop Dates: 22-23 August 2025.