Getting business school reform wrong, Why it happened, and what to do about it

from Robert Locke

Post WWII business schools deans, philanthropic foundation bureaucrats (Ford and Carnegie), and businessmen carried through radical reform of US business school curricula in the 1960s to get rid of “unimaginative, non-theoretical, second rate …students,” working in, to use Herbert Simon’s phrase, “a wasteland of vocationalism,” (Khurana, 236). Their goal was to replace the existing curriculum with a scientific education in which neoclassical economics played a “dominant role within the emerging tinplate for disciplines-oriented business studies.” (Khurana, p. 265, Locke, 1989, Management and Higher Education Since 1940) Rakesh Khurana tells this story in detail in his 2007 book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands (Princeton UP), without much comment, however, about whether the reform, which was thorough, actually succeeded in improving economic performance. I suggest it did not.

Why the Postwar Business School reform

Most histories of this transformation of business studies stress a two step process. First, neo-classical economics imbibed the scientific toolkit that operational research developed during WWII and the Cold War in government agencies and think tanks like the Rand Corporation, therewith claiming to have turned itself into a “prescriptive” science. Then, in a second step, reformers made this new neo-classical economics the dominant force in the subsequent transformation of business school curricula and research.

But the penetration of business schools by neoclassical economics

British Test Case

from Peter Radford

For those austerity advocates amongst you: may I draw your attention to the plight of the British economy?

Its’ headed down again. There’s a distinct possibility that it will enter recession. Make that a third recession. A rare triple dipper. The prolonged slump pervading Britain has now lasted longer than the Great Depression. It is taking an enormous toll. It is steadily eroding the future potential of the economy.

And it is entirely a manmade problem.

Manmade as in Conservative party made..

The British government, for ideological reasons, decided to trash the British economy, It is doing a fine job. So good is its effort that it surely would be eligible for some prize, were prizes given for most asinine, antisocial, deliberately destructive, and all round stupid economic policy.

Plight of workers in Europe continues to worsen (graph)

from David Ruccio

Fighting back against the Eurozone tyrants

from Dean Baker

The eurozone crisis countries still have not developed a workable strategy for countering the policies being imposed by the troika — the European Central Bank (ECB), the IMF and the European Union. Their main problem is not profligate government spending, as fans of data everywhere have long known; the problem is an imbalance in relative prices between the crisis countries and Germany and other northern countries.

This imbalance is causing the crisis countries to run chronic trade deficits. Prior to the collapse of housing bubbles in the peripheral countries, this deficit was financed primarily through massive lending to the private sector in the crisis countries by banks in the northern countries. Since the collapse, the trade deficit has been largely financed with official lending to peripheral country governments. However the core problem is the trade deficit, not government borrowing in the crisis countries.

Prior to the creation of the euro, this problem of competitiveness would be easily addressed by a fall in the value of the currencies of the peripheral countries relative to the currencies of the core countries. However with the single currency, this is not an option. 

Finding a framework for a New Economics

from Geoff Davies

The challenge, and reactions to it

Many economists, and more non-economists, agree that economics needs new ideas, given the comprehensive failure of the mainstream to foresee the Global Financial Crisis and its continuing failure to lift the US and Europe out of deep recession or depression.

Few in the mainstream seem to have any idea where to start. Many non-mainstream economists offer ideas, and many of those ideas are important, but not the whole story. Many of the non-mainstream proposals reach back to older ideas (Keynes, the Austrians, etc., often with valuable but incomplete insight) rather than reaching forward to new and more comprehensive approaches. There seems to be little agreement on which things to change, nor on how much the subject needs to change.  

The economics behind the killings of South African mine workers

from Deniz Kellecioglu

“We were only tolerated simply because our cheap labour is needed.” (Steve Biko)

The killings of 34 demonstrating mine workers in South Africa last month has several background factors, but two of them stand out: police brutality and the exploitation of workers. And they are interlinked.

The aggressiveness of the security forces’ represent the conditioning produced by the governmentality of national and international elites. Thus, the assault in Marikana, South Africa is not an isolated event, it’s a global phenomenon. One major difference is the explicitness of this event – workers usually perish in silence due to, for instance, poor health or social violence, away from the cameras.

The economics behind this governmentality propose that the labour market has to be “flexible” to the demands of “the market”. In other words,

Interests and ideas

from David Ruccio

Self-interest is central to neoclassical economics.

My students certainly know that. According to the neoclassical economics they’ve learned, all choices made by economic agents can be reduced to and explained in terms of self-interest.

But Dani Rodrik [ht: kd] is right:

Interests are not fixed or predetermined. They are themselves shaped by ideas – beliefs about who we are, what we are trying to achieve, and how the world works. Our perceptions of self-interest are always filtered through the lens of ideas.

And, according to Rodrik, neoclassical economics has played a key role in shaping interests: 

Mainstream economics must fall

from David Ruccio

The current spectacle of infighting is one more reason mainstream economics must fall.

It’s not that we needed any more reasons—since, for all their claims to the mantle of science, mainstream economists have continued to move back and forth between contrasting positions. It’s unemployment, no it’s inflation. Fiscal stimulus works best; what we really is expansionary austerity. Let’s see more monetary easing; but watch out for policy uncertainty. And so on and so forth.

But the debate among mainstream economists has entered a new stage—with one group endorsing Team Republican, arguing that “The negative effect of the administration’s ‘stimulus’ policies has been documented in a number of empirical studies,” while the other group accuses them of “giving economics a bad name.”

Technology or Power?

from John Schmitt

Within the economics profession, the standard explanation for rising inequality over the last three decades is that we have been experiencing a long-term shortage of college-educated workers. Technological progress, the story goes, has increased demand for the kind of highly skilled workers that colleges produce, but, young people have not been going to college in sufficient numbers to meet that demand. The result, these economists argue, is that the earnings of the third or so of the workforce with a college degree have pulled ahead of the rest, creating a widening gap between the top and bottom of the income scale. 

Structures of unemployment in the United States

from David Ruccio

Jeffrey Sachs wants desperately to position himself outside the mainstream of the current unemployment debate, arguing that there’s no “quick fix” to the current level of joblessness. But there are no structures in Sachs’s structural analysis.

Let me explain.

Sachs is appropriately critical of the three existing “miracle cures”:   

Private property and capitalist industrialization

from David Ruccio

Neoclassical economists fetishize certain institutions—especially the sanctity of private property—as the necessary conditions for economic development.

However, recent research suggests that Germany achieved capitalist industrialization not on the basis of private property but because of its absence.

Specifically, economic historian Eckhard Höffner argues that Germany caught up with England because it did not institute copyright law. 

The Premonitory Five: Godley, Wray, Forstater, Mosler and Bell

from Edward Fullbrook

The neoclassical mainstream won infamy for remaining oblivious of the impending Global Financial Collapse, whereas Keen, Roubini, Baker and Hudson won fame for analytically foreseeing it and giving ample warning.  Now a “policy note” from the Levy Economics Institute documents analytical warnings of the European Union’s current debt crisis given separately a decade or more ago by five economists:  Wynne Godley (1997), L. Randall Wray (1998), Mathew Forstater (1999), Warren Mosler (2001) and Stephanie Bell (2002).  Below are relevant passages from each of the five.  These two huge examples illustrate how economics could serve, rather than dis-serve, society if the profession were to become in the main science-based rather than faith-based. 

Economics in the crisis

from David Ruccio

It is extraordinary to sit here in the midst of the crisis and read the self-satisfied pronouncements of economists about the state of the discipline.

To be clear, what we’re talking about is the state of the discipline in, not after, the crisis. Whether we’re referring to the situation in the United States or Europe, this is still the deepest and widest set of economic problems since the Great Depression. It is, in short, the Second Great Depression—and there’s no end in sight.

With that sorted out, let’s look at what macroeconomists are writing. First, there’s Simon Wren-Lewis, who explains that “not much” has changed in the teaching macroeconomics since the crash of 2007-08. 

Banking and orthodox economics: an ugly brew

from Peter Radford

Nothing that has emerged about the JP Morgan losses announced last week has altered my original conclusion. This was a basic failure of governance, of regulatory oversight, and of control. Oh, and of orthodox economics. Again.

Yes there were rules in place to prevent such losses. They were ignored. Vanity, hubris, call it what you will, stopped the bank from exercising self-restraint. What appeared to be highly risky, complex, and very large transactions were allowed to take place despite the fact that they were risky, complex, and very large.

The bank thought it was more clever and sophisticated than it was. It turns out to have been dumb. Very dumb.

The oddity here is that these kinds of dumb plays are what brought the banks to their knees back in the crisis. Obviously no one at JP Morgan learned the lesson.

Who is right? Krugman or Keen or / and 9 Central Bank economists?

from Edward Fullbrook

The monetary theory debate starring Krugman and Keen currently raging on the Web desperately needs real-world grounding in the context of the guest post by Jesse Frederik that appeared on this blog on 26 January.  The debate is centered on how banks work.

Keen holds that:

neoclassical economists . . . get it wrong: by ignoring banks, and treating loans as transfers from “savers” to “spenders” with no bank in between.

This is precisely how Krugman models debt in his recent paper: 

The Debtwatch Manifesto

from Steve Keen

Preamble

Click here for this post in PDF

The fundamental cause of the economic and financial crisis that began in late 2007 was lending by the finance sector that primarily financed speculation rather than investment. The private debt bubble this caused is unprecedented, probably in human history and certainly in the last century (see Figure 1). Its unwinding now is the primary cause of the sustained slump in economic growth. The recent growth in sovereign debt is a symptom of this underlying crisis, not the cause, and the current political obsession with reducing sovereign debt will exacerbate the root problem of private sector deleveraging.