This is a good article. It's pretty clear that something is fishy (or
rather, fishier) in the state of economics when it was only a Union for
Radical Political Economics session that attracted Louis Uchitelle of the
NY TIMES and Michael Mandel of BUSINESS WEEK.
But there was a good little talk by Benjamin Friedman, who had made his
name as a Cassandra concerning the government deficit. At the "we come to
bury Robert Eisner not to praise him" session of the AEA, he had a list of
the failures of orthodox macroeconomics that was similar to the one in
Jamie Galbraith's article -- and to that which Tom Palley presented at the
URPE session I chaired.
At 02:55 PM 2/21/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Article URL: http://www.prospect.org/archives/V11-7/galbraith-j.html
>--------------------------------
>HOW THE ECONOMISTS GOT IT WRONG
>
>Written by: James K. Galbraith
>
> The American Economic Association (AEA) met January 7-9 in Boston, for
> a millennial program distinguished by its attention to international
> policy issues, most particularly financial crises (as in Asia) and the
> failure of the so-called "economic transition" (as in Russia).
>
> And yet, in this odd rush to relevance, something was curiously awry.
> Apart from a panel including former World Bank chief economist Joseph
> Stiglitz, the meetings featured almost no one with a record of
> criticizing the institutions that gave us the Asian crisis or the
> transition failure. Instead, they were dominated--in session after
> session--by the architects of the present world order, including
> Yeltsin advisers Andrei Shleifer and Anders Aslund, the International
> Monetary Fund's Stanley Fischer, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence
> Summers. Even the arch-speculator Myron Scholes appeared. Never,
> perhaps, has such a luminous crowd gathered to discuss so disastrous a
> set of its own failings. . . .
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
