THE MAKING OF A RADICAL ECONOMIST January 2010 By Howard J. Sherman Professor Emeritus in Economics at University of California, Riverside And Visiting Scholar in Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
This article answers two questions. First, how do radical economists develop? Second, how do radical departments develop? In order to answer these two questions, I use my own experience in becoming a radical economist and my own experience in developing a radical department. For biographies – and some autobiographies – of many radical economists, see the excellent collection on “dissenting economists” by Sawyer and Arestis, 1982. Their biographies show that the development of radical economists is affected by their political-economic and personal environment, but also by the intellectual environment provided by past economic ideas and by their teachers. My father went bankrupt in the Great Depression. I heard a great deal about this fact and the horrors of the depression as I grew up. So I resolved to understand why depressions occur and how to get rid of them – and about half my research has been on this subject (see, e.g. Sherman, 1991, 2003). But being a radical is more than having a concern about such issues as depressions. When I studied economics, I found that neoclassical economists believed that the system worked well; it was merely subject to external shocks. Since the Great Depression revealed dramatically the instability of the system, since recessions keep occurring, and since all of them have many similar sequences of cause and effect, I rejected the neoclassical paradigm of a perfectly functioning system as an apologetic argument to protect vested interests in the system. My own research has therefore concentrated on the internal processes of the business. full: http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=howard_j_sherman _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
