I looked over the list of 55 papers included on the AEA website and was struck by its extraordinary distance from the concerns of the people on this list ... David Barkin
----------- Yes, I'd say the gap was huge. From my view NSF and AEA live on another planet. They seem to have migrated a long time ago. I am not an economist, but wow. In my historical reading, about how we got here, I came across Hayket and Popper and tried to read them, but couldn't. I got through enough to realize these cold war liberals had invented an ideology of markets and human behavior that had little to do with reality even in the 1950s. They were developing an anti-communist ideology for the west to follow and `beat' back the rising geopolitical power of Red China and the USSR, especially in the third world as it was called back then. They seemed to ignor or deny that the post-war boom years of the US were almost entirely due to the central planning and control that was developed mainly by war planners to manage production to meet the needs of war. That management system had no room for a free for all view of markets. However you want to describe what happened next, which was the break down of the former system, Hayek and Popper's ideology was taken up and essentially replaced the former views. That ideology has been the establishment mantra ever since. As it turned out neoliberalism amounts to handing over control of human and natural resources to large corporate consortiums to do with as they please. The theory is that corporations will make the most efficient use of these resources and thereby work for the benefit of society. Clearly such corporate control has driven most societies into ruin, instability, and chaos. The more unfrettered the corporate control, the worse the result. These papers, I only looked at a couple, seem completely immune to this reality. We are in a systemic failure of the neoliberal project. Of course the architects of these policies are not going to admit an abject failure. They say we need reform. I say we need a complete overhaul. Consider the problem of unemployment and underemployment. This problem is not going to be fully confronted because it illustrates the systemic failure that the ideology attempts to cover up. The most efficient use of human labor is to get rid of as much of it as possible. With that in view, is it any wonder a lot of people are out of work? Among the first few papers in the 54 collection says that wide spread differences between rich and poor nations is a key question to answer. Scanning through the introduction, I didn't see the words corporation, imperialism, exploitation, or neocolonialism. Without that background understanding, it seems ridiculous to write about anything else. There is no mystery here. Reading into another paper, ``The fundamental question: Most young people in the United States will not complete a two or four year college degree and most of them will end up in jobs that do not pay well. How can we structure the US education and training system so that it provides the skills that young people need to earn middle class wages?'' Martin Bailey, Brookings Institution The short answer is stop the privatization of public education and pay for those institutions with tax money, as they were designed and as they did until 1970s. CG
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