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Disheartening report

July 13, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments

I received this disheartening report from someone who attended the recent Western Economic Association International Meetins in Portland, Oregon.

As usual I went to a lot of meetings and lunches. This time I decided to ask some of the younger economists if they thought of themselves as neo-classical economists. They didn’t even seem to understand the question. Like, is there anything else? None of the young women economists were even aware that there was a sub-field calling itself feminist economics; nor had they heard the name of its founder Nancy Folbre.

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Categories: The Economics Profession
  1. Matthias Varul
    July 13, 2010 at 10:21 am | #1
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    so feminist economics is only for women?

  2. Matthias Varul
    July 13, 2010 at 10:30 am | #2
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    am not even slightly surprised… when i began studying economics and sociology some 20 years ago i was taken aback by the fact that, while in sociology we read texts by different authors from diverse theoretical traditions, with different political agendas and a variety of methodological preferences, in economics we had standardised textbooks all operating on the same (not very plausible) paradigm… (a bit like marxism-leninism on the other side of the curtain, only at least on our side you could opt out – which i did… so i’m a sociologist now…)

  3. Simon Halliday
    July 13, 2010 at 10:50 am | #3
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    That is terrifying. It’s called not enough Economic History or History of Economic Thought. A friend of mine and I (both of us econ grad students) were lamenting this fact in encounters with students in a Masters program in Economics at a highly-ranked UK university. The people in question didn’t understand that there were different positions in Macroeconomics, like post-Keynesian, new Keynesian, Neoclassical, etc. They didn’t know there had been a thing called the ‘Neoclassical-Keynesian Synthesis’. They didn’t know about Cambridge v. Cambridge and would go on gaily about capital in their production functions.

    I’ve had similar problems when talking to people about feminist economics, bringing up people like Folbre, Himmelweit, Barker and others. First response: “What is feminist economics?” Second response, “Who are those people?” Tragic.

  4. Mehdi Shafaeddin
    July 13, 2010 at 2:54 pm | #4
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    There is a joke about a lady from Boston. It resembles what many of the Neo-classicals think of their school of economics (if it can be called economics-not a science fiction!).It is as follows:

    Somebody asked a lady from Boston: “where is the nicest place in the world”. She replied: “Boston”. She was then asked: “where have you traveled in your life that you make such a judgment”. She replied :”nowhere, as there is no need to travel elsewhere; Boston is the nicest place in the world”!

  5. Omahkohkiaaiipooyii
    July 13, 2010 at 3:56 pm | #5
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    In his book “Debunking Economics” Steve Keen wonders why neoclassical economics has survived so long given the myriad attacks against it over the years (Louis Boudin, in his “The Theoretical System of Karl Marx” published in 1907 notes that attacks against the rationality assumption even then and common to what is being pushed in Behavioral Economics today, were being pushed then but not as a compromise of neoclassical economics and its core assumptions but as an attempt to bring idealism in new forms and turn a lemon assumptioin into lemonaide–the world is inherently unknowable, common people are irrational not rational, so more “educated” elites should run the world.

    Where is the role of naked opportunism, Faustian Bargains, petit-bourgeois careerism and impotent “House Marxism” in all of this? Why are so many supposed Western radicals trying to imitate establishment journals like AER with their own journals like RRPE full of the same forms of “mathurbation” (gratuitous and irrelevant math that presents a faux scientific aura and obscures rather than illuminates anything) that say and do nothing about the real struggles and real issues of real oppressed people in articles that could never be read, understood or used by those real oppressed people if they had any access to them? Why is their no mention of academic radicals who, like their neoclassical counterparts, appear to play the same publish-or-perish games while they crank out courses more about themselves and their own personal interests/career advancement than anything of real value to many students? No one can buy what is not for sale and that includes consciences and allegiances.

  6. Peter Radford
    July 13, 2010 at 4:05 pm | #6
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    This is both sad and frightening. The state of economics cannot possibly be worse. I feel terrible for those students whose education is so impoverished. What a waste of talent.

    Yet we should take heart. To extend Mehdi’s story about the lady from Boston: the fact that our neoclassical associates are so limited in experience, learning, ambition, and vision leaves us all plenty of room to explore as long as we also quit our own local haunts and take the time to mingle with our heterodox brethren.

    We should all quit worrying about what ‘they’ think, and get on with the exciting job of building economics. If I may inject another metaphor: someone said that if you only have a hammer, all problems look like a nail. That’s the bind neoclassicism is in. They have one tool. We, in contrast, have a whole tool box. Let’s start using it.

  7. Mehdi Shafaeddin
    July 13, 2010 at 4:21 pm | #7
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    I agree with Peter. There is a need to build-up a different theory. The Neo-classical theory has two important marketing advantage: it is simple and clear. Of course whether it is useful or not (which is not) is a different issue. The real economics, by nature, can not be of course as simple, but we should try to make it as clear as possible and as useful as possible.

  8. Merijn Knibbe
    July 14, 2010 at 7:57 am | #8
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    1. Let’s be honest: it’s not us but the neo-classicals who are radical and extremist.

    2. As all extremists, they are, indeed, somewhat ignorant of the rest of the world. Often, they are not even aware of the devastating neo classical criticims of neo-classical economics! In the most recent issue of Real World Economics Review, Keen mentions Stigler’s critique of the horizontal curve of demand – but Stigler is not alone.

    - Gary Becker, of all people, has prooved that you do not need the homo economicus to get a downward sloping curve of demand ( Becker, G.S. (1962), ‘Irrational behaviour and economic theory’, The journal of Political Economy 70 pp. 1-13)

    - Samuelson, of all people, was of the opinion that the concept of ‘utility’ was, in fact, bollocks (Samuelson, P.A., 1937. A note on the measurement of utility, The Review of Economic Studies 4, 155–161). Be aware: there is nothing about modern measurement in this article, just about fuzzy definitions.

    - Above all: Arrow’s famous ‘impossibilty theorem’ states that, even when people have homogenous, transitive indifference curves (which, according to MRI scans, is not the case) you can’t construct a homogenous,transitive ‘social’ indifference curve from these – in other words, the ‘representative consumer’ of the DSGE-world can’t even exist in this world. To be practical: in the national accounts of the USA, race is a defining variable and it turns out that there are large and stable differences in median and average household income between these groups. As there also will be some differences in culture and the like, Arrow in fact states that you can calculate an average for all households – but it is not mathematically inconsistent to analyse this combined average as the income of a ‘representative consumer’.

    Again and again we have to confront neo classical inclinded economists with these devastating findings.

    Though he’s, in my opinion, no real scientist we do have to give Becker some credit that he at least recognizes that the household is the most important economic unit (as Colander, for instance, also does). That’s at least one step into the realm of gender based economics.

    Merijn Knibbe

  9. Robert
    July 16, 2010 at 9:22 am | #9
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    As far as I can see the typical mainstream economist with a recent PhD is incompetent. He has no interest or training in being able to explain why anybody should believe a word he says. (But then I’ve been reading Econ Job Market Rumors.)

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