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Nalin Ranjan: Understanding Epistemology and Methodology in Adolph Lowe’s Political Economics

From conceptualization to implementation, public policy in a modern capitalist
economy with varieties of actors and motivations pose a challenge. Policy design and
policy learning as components of larger policy processes play an important role in
making a policy successful in a complex economy (Cairney 2021, Moyson et al. 2017).
Emerging policy design orientation calls for examining combination of instruments,
interaction among policy actors in an evolving scenario (Howlett et al. 2015).

Studying policy processes especially policy design and policy learning in the light of
Lowe’s theoretical framework can be an interesting agenda for future research.
Further, Controls as an instrument in policy design are less studied, in a democracy
formulating and implementing controls in policy design can be a practically
challenging exercise and calls for further research.

CONCLUSION
Adolph Lowe's political economics offers two theoretical novelties: it
reconceptualizes economics as a social science aimed at establishing a controlled
economic system that works towards a macro-goal rather than seeking only to
predict outcomes, and it provides a logical framework for specific policies and
their implementation through instrumental inference. This logical core is absent
from neoclassical economics, which focuses solely on the conditions of
establishing equilibrium. Obstacles to resource mobility and highly decentralized
decision making in modern economies reduce the analytic capability of traditional
economics. Political economics, with its idea of public control, aims to give a new
direction to economic theorizing that revives the economic theory as a science of
achieving goals, not just prediction. Lowe's ideas have contemporary relevance for
public policy, planning, and economic methodology.

The article first delineated the epistemological conception of Adolph Lowe’s political
economics while moving on to its method of instrumental inference. While bringing
out various steps involved in instrumental inference, the article discussed its relevance
in contemporary national planning and argued that the framework of instrumental
inference is a logical framework to improve policy making in a goal-oriented
economy. From the discussion, further interesting research agenda emerges like
choice, design, and operationalization of control in a globalized democracy, designing
and implementing controls within and without planning bureaucracy, application of
instrumental inference framework to policy processes amid opportunities and
challenges related to big data in policy making and specific channels of policy
learning within the framework of Lowe’s instrumental inference.

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