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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
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Some important
PAE texts
James K.
Galbraith
André Orléan
)
Edward Fullbrook
Gilles Raveaud
Sheila C Dow
The Cambridge 27
Steve Keen
"The Kansas City Proposal"
Geoffrey Hodgson
Julie A. Nelson
Ha-Joon
Chang
Anne Mayhew
Jason Potts
and John Nightingale
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
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