Samuel Brittan, writing in the FT notes:
The editor of the Economic Journal, looking at the [recent] submissions he has received, remarks that the much-discussed crisis of economics “either has not happened or not been recognised by the profession”.Take what comfort you like from these words.
Living in their own little mathematical world, their work based on a set of assumptions so far removed from reality that the world they seek to prescribe to does not exist, this reaction from the economics profession does not surprise me at all. They have assumed the crisis away.
It's time we swept much of what they do away.
To use their own arcane language, this profession has remarkably little utility in use.
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Agree entirely, Richard (as my quote from Geoff Tily’s book in a previous post made clear I hope).
What’s sad (or sick making, depending on your point of view) about this situation – speaking as an academic – is how this situation aorose in universities. In the early 1990s it was quite common to find political economy being taught in universities (or certainly in the ‘new’ universities of which I was aware).
For example, studying a degree in public admninstration as a mature student in the early 1990s I took micro and macro economics (yr 1), and the economics of the EU, and political economy (yr 2). The latter dealt with Smith, Ricardo and Marx and the political and social context in which they worked when developing their various theories (i.e. it set their work in a historical context).
Note however, that even by this stage there were moves to make econometrics a compulsory element (module) if you studied economics. To my knowledge the econometrics movement snowballed through the 1990s as more and more maths people entered HE to teach economics (but really econometrics)- inspired no doubt by the number of people of similar ilk who won the Nobel prize for economics.
Anyway, in my own university of the time this resulted in political economy being withdrawn as an option (despite still being popular amongst students) by the late 1990s. As far as I’m aware this was common across HE as the number of lecturers who could teach the subject retired or moved on.
The results are all to obvious!
That is sad and sickening, we should embrace the people who want economics and teach them not turn them to econometrics. If it is all numbers it has to be seperate from the real world.I’m not saying normal economics isn’t seperate o be it is down to the indervidual more than the subject there.