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Recently, mainstream economists have been debating yet again why ‘economics’ was unable to see the global financial crash coming and/or provide effective policies to end what I have described as the Long Depression that has endured since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.
Mainstream economists John Quiggin and Henry Farrell summed up the debate in a paper: “some blame non-academic economists. Others blame prominent academics. Others still say that economic advice doesn’t really matter, because politicians will pay attention only to the advice that they wanted to hear anyway.”
But Quiggin and Farrell reckon the real reason that mainstream economics failed to be of any use was the lack of agreement among economists on what to do. Economists could not agree on whether austerity was good or bad for the economy; or on whether economists had any influence over politicians. And the reason for this lack of agreement was not due to differences on theory but to “sociology”. By this they mean that mainstream economists are not pure objective ‘economists’ but are “deeply bound up with the political systems that they live within”
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/economic-crises-look-to-science-or-the-rain-gods/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
