Occupy Economics Departments
On November 2nd nearly 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy movement. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest. That’s regrettable since the economics profession has provided the intellectual framework and justification for the inequality and centralization of corporate power the Occupiers are challenging.
“You can’t get into so disastrous a situation as we are in now without extraordinarily bad thinking and the economics departments were the source of that bad thinking,” observes Steven Keen, Professor of Economics at the University of Western Sydney and author of Debunking Economics.
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Marglin addresses an issue ignored by most economists: the effect of their models and the policies derived from them on our sense of community. How Thinking Like An Economist Undermines Community is the subtitle of his book.
“Community is important to a meaningful life,” he maintains. “Community is about human connections; we need community to foster and maintain these connections. And we are diminished as our human connections are diminished.” “The economics we have constructed makes it virtually inevitable that we will leave community out of consideration when we ask questions about economic policy.”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/14-0
More at the link.
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