Heterodox introductory economics

Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin write,

The Economy takes on board the fundamental innovations of Hayek and Nash used in contemporary economics research. But concerns about climate and other market failures as well as economic instability provide reasons to doubt Hayek’s argument that governments should limit their activities to enforcing property rights and other rules that permit markets to function.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. They refer to this free textbook. I can see that I disagree with a lot of it. For example, The Economy says,

Through most of their history, humans have regarded natural resources as freely available in unlimited quantities

This seems wrong to me. Prior to the invention of agriculture, humans had to take into account the limited availability of resources. If nothing else, when hunter-gatherers exhaust a food supply in an area, they have to move or face starvation.

Instead, I would emphasize that the price-and-profit system encourages humans to use our ingenuity to reduce our dependence on scarce resources. This natural tendency toward conservation in a capitalist economy is one of the most important concepts for economists to teach. Thus, the environmental lesson in their book is nearly the opposite of mine in Specialization and Trade.

Still, there are many ways in which their textbook strikes me as a constructive improvement over the textbooks in the Samuelson tradition. I am very sympathetic to their effort to bring more heterodox views into introductory teaching.