Top Comments: Davidson and Radford on decadence and ethical disasters

Paul Davidson on How to succeed as an academic economist

It was not always like this — when I was starting out as an econmist, I published two articles in the 1963 and 1964 AER within three issues, two articles in the EJ, an article in Econometrica, an article in Review of Economic and Statistics as well as articles in the Southern Economics Journal, Western Econmics Journal, etc. And most of these articles pointed out errors by the Economics Establishment –such as Franco Modigliani, etc.

It was only by the mid to late 1970s that the major journals became hostile to non cliche aticles not supporting the gurus. Why? because goovernment and private foundations began financially supporting economic “research” in a bigway — and the gurus were put on committees that approved funding based on previous publication records.

That is why Sidney Weintraub and I co-founded (with financial help from John Kenneth Galbraith) the JOURNAL OF POST KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS to give a publication outlet for those doing original research rather than supportive guru research.

Paul Davidson

 

Peter Radford on RWER issue 56: George DeMartino

The requirement for an ethical examination of economics is simultaneous with the requirement to overthrow absolutist thought. The ethical disasters described in this article – and I do regard them as humanitarian disasters – are not simply the result of ethical failure on the part of many very significant economists. That failure is well documented here and those economists should be censured. But the failure is significant more because of the extreme ideologically driven and utopian nature of the beliefs being forced upon societies by those economists. I sense no remorse. I hear no apology worth anything. I see no demotions. I read of no dismissals. In no other field that I am aware of would such calumny be followed by such utter indifference. Except for banking. Do economists want to be thus associated?

These people still collect very high salaries. They still teach their utopian foolishness. They still dominate discussion. They still clutter the upper echelons of economics with their dreamscapes. And, worse still, they affect [infect?] young minds daily.

DeMartino has done us all a favor by shifting ethics to onto the agenda. We should respond by pressing the debate vigorously, and by admitting that utopian ideas have no value in practice.

      Peter Radford