These accounts are symptoms of a pervasive system of thought control
in economics. But no one knows more about how unwelcome ideas are
kept from being expressed in economics departments and tainting the
minds of curious students than Fred Lee, a professor at the
University of Missouri-Kansas City. He has documented over a hundred
cases where economists who wouldn't drink the neoclassical Kool-Aid
got pushed aside a problem that began over a century ago when the
working classes started to teach themselves Marxist theory.
"The leading economists of the day feared that if workers understood
Marxist theory, the working class would realize how badly they were
being exploited," he says. "Fearing this might lead to revolutionary
fervor, economists sought to recast economic theory to neutralize the
Marxist critique. They limited their neoclassical theory to looking
at innocuous issues such as how prices change. They also sought to
prove that everyone gets paid exactly in accordance with their net
contribution to society, implying that workers aren't exploited and
that is no basis for workers to claim a fairer share of the pie."
Listening to Lee was making me realize that there is a time-honored
tradition in economics of avoiding questions about who gets the
wealth, who benefits and who loses with different economic policies.
But there have been times when it was possible to explore other
schools of thought.
Mainstream control over economics was further consolidated during the
hysteria of McCarthyism in the 1950s. By the 1960s US universities
had been thoroughly cleansed of dissident economists. But this
ultimately undermined the discipline's credibility. With the civil
rights movement highlighting injustice in America, protests against
the Vietnam War spreading across campuses, independence movements
gaining strength in Africa and growing signs of an environmental
crisis, the mainstream economics taught in lecture halls seemed stale
and irrelevant to the commotion outside the classroom windows.
Students took matters into their own hands and organized unofficial
study groups in alternative theories of economics. In 1970, Lee
himself discovered the vast literature written by heretical economists.
Eventually, universities ended up infected with economists who were
openly critical of mainstream economics those same self-taught
students who had studied outside the accepted canon and had gone on
to get graduate degrees and teaching positions. "For a brief time,
many departments were tolerating a couple of dissident economists on
staff," Lee reminisces, "but with the surge of neoliberalism in the
1980s, those who asked the bigger questions were once again being
ostracized, demoted and expelled from universities. In the last
decade, the mainstream professional associations have convinced state
funding bodies in the UK, elsewhere in Europe, Australia and New
Zealand that other schools of economic thought should not qualify for
research funds."
I ask Lee if economists get the teaching positions and the research
money because, as they argue, they've got the better theory in
effect, the better mousetrap while the economists with other
perspectives have theories that don't work?
"The mainstream economists don't have the better mousetrap," insists
Lee. "Much neoclassical theory has zero value in explaining any
socially relevant economic problems in many ways, like creationist
theory, it fails to offer more than superficial explanations for most
of what we observe in the world."
Perhaps Lee has seen too many witch-hunts against economists who
stray from the neoclassical song sheet and now sees the dark shadow
of suppression everywhere. After all, there might be less sinister
explanations as to why only variations on the same old simplistic
theory can be taught, and taught so uncritically. David Colander, who
is rare among economists for being accepted in both alternative and
mainstream camps, suggests that much of the perpetuation of
mainstream economics is simply the result of intellectual laziness.
"It's easier to teach what you've always taught, a model that's been
passed down from father to son again and again," says Colander.
"Economists have nice jobs, they're at the center of society, they
get to travel around the world, they have prestige, and why would you
open up a can of worms if you could avoid it?"
I go back to Lee and ask him if there are other factors, beyond
trying to defend the status quo, that would explain why professors
discourage deeper questioning from students. Why are they not willing
to introduce competing economic theories so students can make up
their own minds?
"The fact that CEOs earn millions while their workers struggle by on
minimum wages is either not examined in classrooms or is shown by the
mainstream model to be completely consistent with properly working
markets and to be leading to the best of all possible worlds," says
Lee. "This of course makes most of the students who are concerned by
such issues switch to other disciplines because they find economics
pointless for what they want to know and do. So generally only the
unquestioning students go on to get a PhD and become professors with
views just like the professors that taught them."
full: http://www.adbusters.org/print/1362
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
