by Metatone
Wed Dec 31st, 2014 at 07:23:09 AM EST
There's yet another "status quo in economic education is basically fine" piece penned by a fairly eminent educator:
In the interests of brevity (it's a long piece), I'll only quote the beginning and the end:
Beginning:
Thoughts on "Teaching Economics After the Crash" -- Medium
This is a long post on the state of economics and how it is taught to undergraduates. The world is not crying out for another such discussion, so blame Tony Yates, via whom I ended up listening to Aditya Chakrabortty's documentary "Teaching Economics After the Crash" for BBC Radio 4.
Like Tony, I viewed the programme as a hopelessly one-sided critique of the economics profession. Still, it was useful in the sense that it packed all the regular criticisms about economics into one short piece. I agree with most of what Tony wrote but I want to take a different approach because I think it's worth engaging a bit more positively with the criticisms raised.
front-paged by afew
End:
Thoughts on "Teaching Economics After the Crash" -- Medium
Conclusion
I reckon nobody's reading at this point, so I'll just say what I think to keep myself happy.
The world economy is more complicated than any of us can understand and getting more so by the day. There are no magic formulae for understanding it and it takes many years of learning about it to even understand which kinds of approaches to thinking about the economy are useful versus which kinds are not. Undergraduate students are really not the best people to be designing a syllabus for a subject that is so bloody complicated.
But the truth is that many students are dissatisfied and a significant amount of their complaints are well-founded. With all the attractions of the information age available to them, students are more demanding than ever and can be turned off a subject more quickly in the past. We need to work harder to show students how economics connects with the real world and we need to explain to them how we think and why we think that way.
A question and then a thought.
The question: deep in the piece, the author brings out the typical defence when faced with the question of neoliberal bias:
Thoughts on "Teaching Economics After the Crash" -- Medium
Victoria contributed the following:
At the fundamental root cause of the crisis is the belief of economists in the free market capitalist system and the result of this growing faith, that really began in the 1980s with the rise of Margaret Thatcher and with Reagan in the US, the result of that belief was a liberalisation of markets, privatisation, the rolling back of the state, deregulation of the financial sector. And so we began to experience full-blown capitalism. That it would be set forth free reign and the result would be low unemployment, inflation that was under control, respectable even high economic growth rates. The result was that, on the eve of the global financial crisis, economists were looking ahead and imagining a rosy future.
I genuinely do not recognise the economics profession in this description, nor indeed the description of the actual economy. In light of what we know from economic history, could the UK economy of the Tony Blair years -- with its national health care and social welfare system -- credibly be called "full-blown capitalism"?
I'll put aside the straw man about the NHS and social welfare and I'd like to ask people here - what's your experience of economists?
My own is that many of them are happy to be subtle in their specialist area, but default to dogmatic neoliberal attitudes on general issues.
My first observation on this is that it may well be that general economics undergraduate education isn't really the big problem. In that sense, this whole post (like so many defences by economists) is a misdirection. The key question is, if economics isn't so bad after all, how did policy come to be so bad? How is it that the circles of policy and government service default to knee-jerk neoliberalism? And fundamentally, where are the economists speaking up against the knee-jerk policies?