|
|
59
chapters, 500+ pages
Contents
Click here to buy from Amazon.com for
$29.95
Click here to buy from Amazon.co.uk for
£17.99
Six
winners of the Bank of Sweden Prize for
Economics have written as follows.
". . .
economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather
than dealing with real economic problems"
Milton
Friedman
“[Economics
as taught] in America's
graduate schools... bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over
science.”
Joseph Stiglitz
"Existing
economics is a theoretical [meaning mathematical] system which floats in
the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real
world"
Ronald
Coase
“We live in
an uncertain and ever-changing world that is continually evolving in new
and novel ways. Standard
theories are of little help in this context. Attempting to understand economic,
political and social change requires a fundamental recasting of the way we
think”
Douglass North
“Page
after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical
formulas […] Year after year economic theorists continue to produce scores
of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal
properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all
possible shapes to essentially the same sets of
data”
Wassily Leontief
“Today
if you ask a mainstream economist a question about almost any aspect of
economic life, the response will be: suppose we model that situation and
see what happens…modern mainstream economics consists of little else but
examples of this process”
Robert
Solow
Post-Autistic Economics is about changing this state
of affairs.
"Economics
is supposed to be social science, i.e. an intellectual discipline resting
upon empirically-observed facts, in which mathematics and conceptual
frameworks are tools for understanding. But in contemporary
mainstream economics, the tools are often in the driver's seat, declaring
evident facts impossible and reducing the subtleties of the real world to
whatever clockwork economists best know how
to build. Post-Autistic economics is the attempt to escape the
tyranny of these tools and build new ones that will work
properly."
Ian
Fletcher
“Modern
economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game
played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for
understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject
into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything
and practical relevance is nothing.”
Mark Blaug
Contents
Introduction
Click here to buy from Amazon.com for
$22.76
Click here to buy from Amazon.co.uk for
£13.29
Contents
Here are more things
seriously wrong with traditional economics that Post-Autistic Economics
addresses.
“. . .
the close to monopoly position of neoclassical
economics is not compatible with normal ideas about democracy. Economics is science in some
senses, but is at the same time ideology. Limiting economics to the
neoclassical paradigm means imposing a serious ideological
limitation. Departments of
economics become political propaganda centers .
. .”
Peter Söderbaum
“Economics
students . . . graduate from Masters and PhD programs with an effectively
vacuous understanding of economics, no appreciation of the intellectual
history of their discipline, and an approach to mathematics that hobbles
both their critical understanding of economics and their ability to
appreciate the latest advances in mathematics and other sciences. A minority of these ill-informed
students themselves go on to be academic economists, and they repeat the
process. Ignorance is
perpetuated”
Steve Keen
"Undergraduate economics is a joke --
macro is okay, but micro is a joke because they teach this stuff that you
know is not true. They know the general equilibrium model is not true. The
model has no good stability properties, it doesn't predict anything
interesting, but they teach it ... "
Herbert Gintis
“The
human economy has passed from an “empty world” era in which human-made
capital was the limiting factor in economic development to the current
“full world” era in which remaining natural capital has become the
limiting factor “
Robert Costanza
“Most
courses deal with an ‘imaginary world,’ and have no link whatsoever with
concrete problems.”
Emmanuelle Benicort
“All of
these textbooks fail to explain how prices are determined in ‘markets’’
and thus how markets work.
Where do prices come from?
Who determines them?
How do they fluctuate?
These questions are never addressed, even though it is through the
price mechanism that the ‘invisible hand’ is supposed to operate.”
Le Mouvement Autisme-Économie
“. . .
mainstream economists seek knowledge through
numbers to stop the messy reality of people, processes and politics
dirtying their invisible hands.”
Alan Shipman
“Multinationals
are everywhere except in economic theories and economics departments.”
Grazia Ietto-Gillies
“. . . the
economist must engage him or herself as a citizen with convictions
regarding the public good and ways of treating it, rather than as the
holder of universal truth that he or she substitutes for discussion in
order to impose it on us all.”
André Orléan
“The Taliban, and its variety of
fundamentalist thinking, has been the most controlling and oppressive
regime with regard to women in contemporary times. Contemporary academic economics,
and contemporary global economic policies, are gripped by other rigidities
of thinking – what George Soros has dubbed
‘market fundamentalism.’
Fantasies of control are operative in both phenomena, and gender is
far from irrelevant to understanding their power, and their
solution.”
Julie A. Nelson
“There is
an urgent need for a more realistic economics of the environment, with
theories and analyses that can help to create environmentally sustainable
economic activity.”
Frank
Ackerman
“Modern economics is not
very successful as an explanatory endeavour. This much is accepted by most
serious commentators on the discipline, including many of its most
prominent exponents”
Tony
Lawson
“Because
mathematics has swamped the curricula in leading universities and graduate
schools, student economists are neither encouraged nor equipped to analyze
real world economies and institutions.”
Geoffrey
M. Hodgson
“.
. . the concepts of uneconomic growth,
accumulating illth, and unsustainable scale have
to be incorporated in economic theory if it is to be capable of expressing
what is happening in the world. This is what ecological economists are
trying to do.”
Herman E.
Daly
“The
application of mathematics to economics has proved largely unsuccessful
because it is based on a misleading analogy between economics and physics.
Economics would do much better to model itself on another very successful
area, namely medicine, and, like much of medicine, to adopt a qualitative
causal methodology.”
Donald
Gillies
“Economic
history courses have been disappearing from classrooms across the world.
Once a compulsory part of economics education, they have been relegated to
the remote corners of ‘options’ and even closed down.”
Ha-Joon Chang
“In
Smith is a forgotten lesson that the foundation of success in creating a
constructive classical liberal society lies in the individuals’ adherence
to a common social ethics. According to Smith, virtue serves as ‘the fine
polish to the wheels of society’ while vice is
‘like the vile rust, which makes them jar and grate upon one
another.’ Indeed, Smith sought to distance his thesis from that of
Mandeville and the implication that individual greed could be the basis
for social good. Smith’s deistic universe might not sit well with those of
post-enlightenment sensibilities, but his understanding that virtue is a
prerequisite for a desirable market society remains an important lesson.
For Smith ethics is the hero-not self-interest or greed-for it is ethics
that defend social intercourse from the Hobbesian chaos.”
Charles
K. Wilber
“. . . conventional economics . . . remains fixated on the
view that economics is the physics of society. In other words, most of the
profession behaves as if there were a single universally valid view of the
world that needs only to be applied.”
Paul
Ormerod
|
post-autistic economics
review
contact
An emailed pdf
economics journal with 9,590 subscribers from over 150
countries
subscribe for free
and
receive by email each issue, beginning with the current no. 44
Back Issues
issue
43 issue
42
issue
41 issue
40 issue
39 issue
38 issue 37
issue
36 issue
35 issue
34 issue
33
issue
32 issue
31 issue
30 issue
29 issue
28 issue
27 issue
26 issue
25 issue
24
issue
23 issue
22 issue
21 issue
20 issue
19 issue
18 issue
17 issue
16 issue 15
More Back
Issues
Topics
Ecological
Economics Ethics Heterodox
Economics Pluralism Development
The Post-Autistic Economics
Movement
A brief
history
The Strange History of
Economics
Policy Implications
of Post-Autistic Economics
Network
Resources
Some
articles on the PAE Movement
“Teaching
Economics: PAE and Pluralism”, (EAEPE, July
2005)
“Post-Autistic
Economics” (Social Policy, summer
2005)
“Post-Autistic
Economics” (Soundings, April 2005)
“Signifying nothing?”
(The Economist, Jan
29, 2004)
“Revolutionizing
French Economics”
(Challenge, Nov/Dec. 2003) pdf
“Fired up for
battle” The
Guardian (UK) 9
September 2003
”Taking On 'Rational
Man'”
The Chronicle of Higher Education (US) 24 Jan. 2003
”The 2002 Nobel
Prize in Economics” The Journal of Investing (US) Spring
2003
“The Storming of the
Accountants” The New
Statesman (UK) 21 Jan. 2002
“Post-autisten' vallen economische heilige huisjes aan”
De
Morgen (Bruxelles) 2 Mar. 2002
English
Translation
“movimiento económico postautista”
IBLNEWS, 14 March 2002
“Distorted
economic relations: A new movement – the post-autistic economists
want to renew economics” Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) 3 April 2002
Some important PAE
texts
The Student Petition of
Autisme-Economie
(June 2000)
French Petition
for a Debate on the Teaching of
Economics (July
2000)
Issue No. 1
of the post-autistic economics newsletter ( September 2000)
A Contribution on
the State of Economics in France and the
World
James K. Galbraith
Autistic Economics vs.
the Environment
Frank Ackerman
Humility in
Economics
André Orléan )
Real Science is
Pluralist
Edward Fullbrook
Teaching Economics
Through Controversies
Gilles Raveaud
Back to
Reality
Tony Lawson
The Relevance of
Controversies for Practice as Well as Teaching
Sheila C Dow
Opening Up
Economics
The Cambridge
27
Economists Have No
Ears
Steve Keen
An International Open
Letter
"The Kansas
City
Proposal"
How Did Economics Get
Into Such a State?
Geoffrey Hodgson
Why the PAE Movement
Needs Feminism
Julie A. Nelson
Kicking Away the
Ladder: How the Economic
and Intellectual Histories of Capitalism Have Been
Re-Written
to
Justify Neo-Liberal Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang
Economic History and the Rebirth of
Respectable Characters
Stephen T. Ziliak
Some Old But Good
Ideas
Anne Mayhew
An
Alternative Framework for Economics
Jason Potts
and John Nightingale
Susan Feiner
Is There Anything
Worth Keeping in Standard Microeconomics?
Bernard Guerrien
Doctrine-centered Versus Problem-centered Economics
Peter Dorman
Social Being as a
Problem for an Ethical Economics
Jamie
Morgan
The
Petitions
Student Essays on
PAE
Two World Views: Ecological
Economics vs. Environmental Economics
German
Section
French
Section
Portuguese
Section
Spanish
Section
Chinese,
Flemish, Italian and Turkish Sections
The Perestroika Movement - a sister movement to PAE in
political science
Miscellaneous
Some more articles
concerning the PAE Movement
New Post-Autistic Economics
Books
A Brief History of the Post-Autistic
Economics Movement
Theories, scientific and
otherwise, do not represent the world as it is but rather by highlighting
certain aspects of it while leaving others in the dark. It may be the case that two
theories highlight the same aspects of some corner of reality but offer
different conclusions. In the
last century, this type of situation preoccupied the philosophy of
science. Post-Autistic Economics, however,
addresses a different kind of situation: one where one theory, that
illuminates a few facets of its domain rather well, wants to suppress
other theories that would illuminate some of the many facets that it
leaves in the dark. This
theory is neoclassical economics.
Because it has been so successful at sidelining other approaches,
it also is called “mainstream economics”.
From the 1960s onward,
neoclassical economists have increasingly managed to block the employment
of non-neoclassical economists in university economics departments and to
deny them opportunities to publish in professional journals. They also have narrowed the
economics curriculum that universities offer students. At the same time they have
increasingly formalized their theory, making it progressively irrelevant
to understanding economic reality.
And now they are even banishing economic history and the history of
economic thought from the curriculum, these being places where the student
might be exposed to non-neoclassical ideas. Why has this tragedy happened?
Many factors have
contributed, but three especially.
First, neoclassical economists have as a group deluded themselves
into believing that all you need for an exact science is mathematics, and
never mind about whether the symbols used refer quantitatively to the real
world. What began as an
indulgence became an addiction, leading to a collective fantasy of
scientific achievement where in most cases none exists. To preserve their illusions,
neoclassical economists have found it increasingly necessary to isolate
themselves from non-believers.
Second, as Joseph Stiglitz has observed, economics has suffered “a
triumph of ideology over science”.1 Instead of regarding their theory
as a tool in the pursuit of knowledge, neoclassical economists have made
it the required viewpoint from which, at all times and in all places, to
look at all economic phenomena.
This is the position of neoliberalism.
Third, today’s economies,
including the societies in which they are embedded, are very different
from those of the 19th century for which neoclassical economics
was invented to describe.
These differences become more pronounced every decade as new
aspects of economic reality emerge, for example, consumer societies,
corporate globalization, economic induced environmental disasters and
impending ecological ones, the accelerating gap between the rich and poor,
and the movement for equal-opportunity economies. Consequently neoclassical
economics sheds light on an ever-smaller proportion of economic reality,
leaving more and more of it in the dark for students permitted only the
neoclassical viewpoint. This
makes the neoclassical monopoly more outrageous and costly every year,
requiring of it ever more desperate measures of defense, like eliminating economic history and history
of economics from the curriculum.
But eventually reality overtakes time-warp worlds like
mainstream economics and the Soviet Union. The moment and place of the
tipping point, however, nearly always takes people by surprise. In June 2000
.................... more
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Strange History of Economics
These days people like to call neoclassical economics
“mainstream economics” because most universities offer nothing else. The name also backhandedly
stigmatizes as oddball, flaky, deviant, disreputable, perhaps un-American
those economists who venture beyond the narrow confines of the
neoclassical axioms. To
understand the powerful attraction of those axioms one must know a little
about their origins. They are
not what an outsider might think.
Although today neoclassical economics cavorts with neoliberalism, it began as a
honest intellectual and would-be scientific endeavour. Its patron saint was neither an
ideologue nor a political philosopher nor even an economist, but Sir Isaac
Newton. The founding fathers
of neoclassical economics hoped to achieve, and their descendents living
today believe they have, for the economic universe what Newton had
achieved for the physical universe.
This brief article roughly
traces the strange history of economics from the 1870s through to the
beginning of Post-Autistic Economics movement in the summer of 2000. .................... more
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Policy Implications of
Post-Autistic Economics
The neoclassical monopoly in the
classroom and its prohibition on critical thinking means that it
brainwashes successive generations of students into viewing economic
reality exclusively through its concepts, which more often than not
misrepresent or veil the world, especially today’s world. Nearly all of these neoclassical
notions have a bearing on judgements about social, cultural and economic
policy. Consequently, if
society were to learn to think about economic matters outside the
neoclassical conceptual system, it would almost certainly choose different
policies. One of Post-Autistic
Economics’ (PAE) projects has been to expose
some of the many conceptual lunacies of today’s mainstream, both in terms
of the concepts it uses and the concepts it lacks. Drawing on recent essays by PAE
economists in A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics, especially
the chapters by Michael A. Bernstein, Geoffrey Hodgson, Peter
Söderbaum, Hugh Stretton, Richard Wolff, Robert Costanza, Herman E. Daly, Jean Gadrey and Edward Fullbrook,* this brief article briefly considers
ten such concepts.
Neoclassical economics regards
competition as a state rather than as a process. It defines perfect competition as
a market with a large number of firms with identical products,
costs structures, production techniques and market information. But in real life competition is a
process by which firms continually seek to re-establish the conditions of
their own profitability. To
compete in a market requires firms to seek out and exploit differences
between them in production, technology, distribution, access to
information and awareness of trends in consumption. These differences are the
essential dimensions in which competition takes place. Once the neoclassical conception
of competition becomes imbedded in the student’s mind, appreciation of
real-world competition, and hence the policies that might enhance it,
becomes logically impossible.
Neoclassical economists love to talk
about freedom of choice.
But this is pure rhetoric, because they define rationality in a way
that eliminates free choice from their conceptual space. By rationality they mean
that an agent’s choices are in conformity with an ordering or scale of
preferences. The “rational”
agent chooses among the alternatives available that one which is highest
on his ranking.
Rational behaviour simply means behaviour in accordance with some
ordering of alternatives in terms of relative desirability. In order for this approach to have
any predictive power, it must be assumed that the preferences do not
change over some period of time.
So the basic condition
of neoclassical rationality is that individuals must forego choice
in favour of some past reckoning, thereafter acting as automata. This conceptual elimination of
freedom of choice, in both its everyday and philosophical meanings, gives
neoclassical theory the hypothetical determinacy that its Newtonian
inspired metaphysics require.
No indeterminacy; no choice.
No determinacy; no neoclassical model. This is far from just an academic
matter, because society needs an economics that is able to address
questions regarding freedom of choice.
No terms in neoclassical economics are more
sacrosanct than rational choice and rationality. Everyone identities with these
words, because everyone wants to think of themselves as rational. But few people realize that
economists give these words an ultra eccentric meaning. Neoclassical economics begins with
an a priori conception of markets and economies as determinate
systems that by the action of individual agents alone tend toward an
efficient and market-clearing equilibrium. This requires that the individual
agents, like the bodies in Newton’s system, behave in a prescribed
manner. Neoclassicalists have deduced the particular pattern
of behaviour that would make their imagined world logically possible, then
named it “rational choice” or “rationality” and then declared that that is
the way real people behave.
But thankfully they don’t.
Everyday economic actors do many things that by the neoclassical
meaning of “rational” are “irrational”. Looking to the choices of
other consumers as guides to what one might buy; buying a stock because
you believe other people will be buying it and so increase its value,
spending your money in a spirit of spontaneity rather than stopping to
calculate the consequences and alternatives up to the limits of your
cognitive powers; a taste for change, that is, buying something because
you did not previously prefer it; these common consumer behaviours are all
prohibited under the neoclassical notions of rational choice and
rationality and so outside its scope of analysis.
These failings connect with another. Neoclassical economics is by its
own axioms incapable of offering a coherent conceptualisation of the
individual or economic agent. From where do the preferences that
supposedly dictate the individual’s choice come from? Not from interpersonal relations,
because if individual demands were interdependent, they would not be
additive and thus the market demand function – neoclassicalism’s key analytical tool – would be
undefined. And not from
society, because neoclassicalism’s Newtonian
atomism translates as methodological individualism, meaning that society
is to be explained in terms of individuals and never the other way
around.
This
leaves an awful lot in the dark.
In the main, despite the neoclassical axioms, we all categorise and
classify according to prevailing cultural norms. Likewise our tastes and
preferences for this and that reflect the social conventions and
institutions with which we interact.
Consequently individual choice is unavoidably and inextricably
bound up with historically and geographically given social worlds. An economics that has nothing to say
about the formation of economic tastes and preferences is silly and
irresponsible, especially in an age of consumer societies and in a world
now threatened with climate-change or worse.
For half a century
neoclassical economics has hid its ideology behind the notion that it
calls positive economics.
This is the idea that it contains no value judgements because it
mentions none. Of course such
a notion belongs to an intellectually more naive age than today, but
nonetheless it persists as an effective tool of indoctrination of
undergraduates. The fact that
neoclassical economics requires a highly restricted focus in order to
maintain its atomist and determinist metaphysics compels it to make many
extreme judgements about what is and is not economically important. There is not space even to list
them. But an example is
its notion of
“economic man”, which is acutely ideological, as it
emphasizes some roles and relationships and excludes others. By allowing only decisions based
on utility maximization, it excludes other forms of ethics. As an economic agent, each
individual acts in many roles, not just market ones, and is guided by his
or her “ideological orientation”.
That orientation may be founded on utilitarianism or not. It may for example be based on
social and environmental ethics.
PAE economists do not believe that economists have the right to
select one ethics as the “correct” one for framing economic analysis. Furthermore the neoclassical
insistence upon the utilitarian ideology legitimises a kind of “market
ideology” and “consumerism” that increasingly appears dangerous to society
and sidelines the debate about Sustainable Development.
Like
rationality, nearly everyone thinks efficiency is a good idea. Neoclassical economists adore
using this word, especially when addressing the public. But the meaning of “efficiency”
always depends on what you choose to count. For example,
.............. more
|
|