The time for a new economics is at hand
by Julie Matthaei @JulieMatthaei
In early January I passed out a leaflet to my colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Boston, which brought together more than 11,000 economists and social scientists. The leaflet pointed out the professions failure to predict the 2008 financial crisis and challenged economics professors to incorporate new ideas into their teachings. As a self-proclaimed Marxist-feminist-anti-racist-ecological economist and economics professor, I was glad to take this opportunity to protest the lack of pluralism in the profession as well as the weaknesses of mainstream neoclassical economic theory, especially in the currently dominant free-market form.
The leafleting was part of an action organized by the kick-it-over campaign of Adbusters, the anti-consumerist Canadian nonprofit headed by Kalle Lasn, whose call to occupy Wall Street sparked the movement that swept the U.S. in the fall of 2011. Just as Occupy Wall Street aimed at exposing the failures of the financial industry, the kick-it-over campaign aims to expose the failures of the economics profession. The recent rise of Rethinking Economics and the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics, with groups in more than 20 countries, is part of this heartening trend.
One of the biggest weaknesses of U.S. economists and economics these days is the inability to think creatively. Almost all introductory economics classes taught in the United States and core theory courses for economics majors and Ph.D. students teach a school of economic theory that historians of economic thought call neoclassical economics (opposed to the earlier, classical economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx). Neoclassical economists take the capitalist market economy as a given and focus on its allocation of scarce resources among competing individuals. They build models based on assumptions of narrowly self-interested, materialistic utility maximization by consumers and profit maximization by firms. Sharing this foundation, their liberal and conservative camps disagree about the type and extent of government intervention required to respond to market failures. Neoclassical economics provides a wealth of insights into capitalist market economies. The problem is that it represents itself as economics, per se.
The important insights of other forms of economics which tend to be more historical, critical and visionary are thereby banished. For example, radical and Marxist economics, which focus on the class inequality and power, bring crucial warnings about economic injustice and the corruption of political power by the wealthy and large corporations as well as visions of possible superior economic systems. And feminist economics, by foregrounding gender difference and inequality, elucidates the problems resulting from the nonpayment of reproductive labor and the banishment of feminine caring values from the goals of capitalist firms. These and other heterodox specialties exist in professional associations and journals, but they are almost never mentioned, let alone represented, in core economics classes at the undergraduate or graduate level. Students who question the narrowness of neoclassical assumptions and models are told to think like an economist i.e., a neoclassical economist or else. This narrowness of perspective is reproduced when students who were taught only neoclassical economics become professors who teach only it.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/the-time-for-a-new-economics-is-at-hand.html
fasttense
(17,301 posts)American economists. Though the primary infection route is through economists, it can and does infect anyone. It is capitalism blindness. It as if the only thing those infected see is capitalism, much like snow blindness.
When people say economics those infected hear capitalism. Some hear capitalism when the word democracy is used. When you mention some of the horrors associated with capitalism, they can't hear you at all. It's as if no other form of economics exist.
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)K&R
bemildred
(90,061 posts)And Vietnam.
If you've been paying attention, you have noticed that the counter-culture revolt won. We did not accomplish economic democracy, but we did get a lot more social democracy, and all sorts of oppressed groups now feel able to assert their own views about who they are and what they want from life.
We got all sorts of concessions, but we let them keep the money and the secret government, that was our mistake. We were naive. But then, we were kids. It was only in the 80s when I got to working in defense that I realized how thoroughly corrupt the defense business and our government are. When you are a kid, you believe what the authorities tell you, you have no choice.
But now comes the counter-reaction. And they say that Marx didn't know what he was talkiing about.
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)I suspect Americans feel overwhelmed, their own corners of the world are threatened
and have been threatened by very real predators ( Wall Street ) and I will add the elites
ignorance..or should I say, arrogance, regarding keeping our planet healthy. It's not
like you get a do over for many things you screw up.
The OP is very good, I hope more people here read it as we consider the next
general election...thanks, bemildred.