A new Organization for a Long and Distinguished Tradition
by John Weeks,
http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/06/reviving-a-progressive-economics-a-new-organization-for-a-long-and-distinguished-tradition/... In the early 1960s I chose economics to study at the University of Texas (Austin) because I wanted to help make the world a better place. It is safe to say that if today a student is so motivated, there is almost no university in the developed world that would make even a pretension to provide such economics training. On the contrary, especially in the English-speaking countries economics departments are dedicated to a dogmatic free market ideology that permits no dissent.
In the European Middle Ages the dogmas of the Catholic church enforced daunting barriers to scientific inquiry. The pernicious effect of mainstream (neoclassical) economics is far worse and considerably more powerful ideologically. It is a virus of the mind. Once implanted in the mental processes, it systematically destroys the ability to conduct rational thought. As an intellectual method, it does not render the exoteric into the esoteric (explaining what we observe by what we cannot observe but theoretically infer), which is the function of science. Rather, it renders the complexities of what we observe into ahistorical and anti-social trivia, with its triviality obscured by cabalistic mathematics.
The obviously social nature of human existence is rejected by the neoclassicals in favor of the absurdity that each person is an isolated individual (I recommend that the progressively minded not use the word “individual”, but “people” and “person” in its place). Bereft of the hopes, fears, anxieties and feelings of personal responsibility that make us human. These “individuals” are driven by pure personal greed. The goodness of greed is defined as “rational” behavior. This individualized, irresponsible greed allegedly results in the general welfare. It is difficult to image a doctrine either more vulgar or more flagrantly in the interest of capital.
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In the late 1970s and 1980s, as politics in the Anglo Saxon countries shifted decisively to the right, the neoclassical fundamentalists made their move: if the profession accepted the validity of self-adjusting, general equilibrium full employment, wasn’t it time that the true believers took control of the profession? In ideological terms, the subsequent purge of all non-neoclassical tendencies, no matter how mild, closely tracked the Spanish Inquisition.
Like the central purpose of the Inquisition, the consolidation of the Spanish nation state (through purging of Islamic and Jewish influence in Iberia), the neoclassical purpose was to create a reactionary, pseudo-intellectual bastion in defense of capitalism, in its most vulgar and anti-social form. The transformation of the economics profession from a field of intellectual inquiry into a closed, dogmatic servant of the status quo is unprecedented in academia. This transformation would be equivalent to Creationism taking over the field of genetics...
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http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/06/reviving-a-progressive-economics-a-new-organization-for-a-long-and-distinguished-tradition/John Weeks is an economist and Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London.
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