On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Forstater, Mathew <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The late Don Lavoie started the Austrian program at GMU. [...] > before his death at age 50 Don ended > up leaving the economics department and starting the Program on Social > and Organizational Learning (POSOL) and getting very involved in the > Cultural Studies program at GMU. > > Don's students all read Marx, Keynes, et al., and were very open to > friendly debate with those who disagreed with them. I was invited to > GMU to present my work at their seminar even though they full well knew > I would be critical of Austrian ideas and present policy conclusions > far, far away from theirs. >
OT, but as a student in the GMU cultural studies program, I can attest to the the influence he had on students in that program. Unfortunately he passed away before I got to work with him. It was a deeply felt loss to the many in the program and IIRC Dr. Lavoie was very influential on our first PhD, Robert Shepherd, whose book has just been published. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433101947 Many of the current students have taken to sitting in on the GMUonomics classes to get a sense of how they think--there is no sense in actually trying to learn economics from them since it doesn't take long to figure out the logic is deduced from some parallel universe--and we've tried asking some of their faculty to sit on panels (specifically Cowen, who finally agreed last year). And sometimes I make it to the annual Econ Lit conference they have over the summer. On the one hand, there are clearly some bright students in the department. Unfortunately, it is such a closed system that there is little they can do except work within the narrow ideological parameters allowed there. A topic of conversation was how Milton Friedman was still too Socialist and, as I mentioned last summer when Michael came to speak, Adam Smith is sacrosanct. I would say it speaks to their openness that Michael Perelman was invited at all, but he didn't really give the paper he wrote because people in the audience were hounding him with interruptions, Wealth of Nations in hand, in an attempt to refute every paragraph he uttered, I think it speaks more to Michael's generosity and rigor as a scholar that he continued to speak and stuck around for the rest of the week. When I talked to one of the students there about my program, she spoke in hushed tones and recommended I look into Diedre McCloskey--who, while closer to Cultural Studies (I actually saw her speak this past fall on a panel with Lawrence Grossberg), is still quite Coasian in her economics work. Still, for that program, she represents a real maverick and when she came to speak a year or so after Don's passing, the CS students who went to hear her couldn't get a word in edgewise during the Q&A because it was dominated by students and faculty from the Econ dept trying to tear apart any miniscule deviation from their own peculiar orthodoxy. If it weren't for the fact that the program--in cooperation with the equally ideological Law School--was so deeply committed to influencing policy on the hill a few miles down the road, it would merely be an amusing cult. However, since they not only coach every undergraduate going through Micro, but also work at keeping a steady stream of scholars through revolving doors of lobby groups, etc. working in various public and private forums to eviscerate any hint of even the mildest attributes of social democracy from the conversation. The writers of blogs mentioned in the article forwarded early in the conversation are just the tip of the iceberg. Walter Williams, for one, regularly appears alongside Oliver North, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh's son David on Redstate.com and Townhall.com, which used to be funded by the Heritage Foundation. There is a real research project for someone there. On a personal level, I can say that they remain a constant inspiration for me. I sometimes end up on the elevator with Williams or others; other times I have to go to the Law Library and get books (I relish checking out Hayek and Von Mises from the library of a public university); and the coffee shop where I get a lot of reading done is right across the street from this constantly expanding Arlington, VA campus: like the offices CACI--the "information services" contractor that Col Karpinski claims was at least partially responsible for retrieving "information" from the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, also a prominent building on my drive--they inspire me to work hard every day because I know they are working hard every day. In this, I don't rationally calculate my potential to receive a market benefit, but it would be nice help to reduce the market for their products (which their belligerence is always hoping to expand) so that the damage they do--or hope to do--can be minimized ever so slightly. If this helps me finish my dissertation, I will certainly include a note of gratitude to them. s _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
