Open Democracy is starting a new debate under the above title.
The opening salvo has been fired by Will Davies, who says this:
It is time to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about the public status of economics as an expert discipline: it has grown to be far more powerful as a tool of political rhetoric, blame avoidance and elite strategy than for the empirical representation of economic life. This is damaging to politics, for it enables value judgements and political agendas to be endlessly presented in ‘factual' terms. But it is equally damaging to economics, which is losing the authority to describe reality in a credible, disinterested, Enlightenment fashion.
Worth a read.
Time for the Courageous State, I say.
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One of the people who is leading the charge against the continued neo-classical consensus is Professor Steve Keen, a hugely impressive Australian whos book Debunking Economics I am reading now, and who I am meeting later this week.
I wrote a piece about the insanity of continued adherence to a belief system that’s based on many obvious fallacies (e.g. perfect markets, that debt is irrelevant and resources not finite) here http://www.qfinance.com/blogs/ian-fraser/2012/03/09/neo-classical-economics-led-us-into-a-cul-de-sac-now-we-must-find-a-way-out
By the way, Richard, I was inspired to write this after I interviewed you for Qfinance what seems like an age ago! Hopefuly that will be going online at qfinance very very soon. It is already in the 3rd edition of the book.
Steve Keen is fantastic, his Debunking Economics is a sheer delight to someone who studied economics but felt it was totally unrelated to the real world. I met him a couple of weeks ago and encouraged him to pick up on the land issue – this is a big missing link in heterodox economics at the moment, IMO. Michael Hudson appears to be the only one who understands it fully.
Professor Michael Hudson is a economist that sees clearly what is wrong, and has the courage to say it. He has many insights into the behaviour of the banks, and the wrongness of the way in which the tax burden has moved from the rentier classes to low paid labour.
He sees neoliberalism as a cynical wealth grab by the 1%, and the bailouts as a scam for the banks. If some of the politicians had his insight and courage, we may get a courageous state.
There are many links to his wisdoms:
http://therealnews.com/t2/component/hwdvideoshare/?task=viewvideo&video_id=73457
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvOlDlYlOIU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZqpVsUKHek&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKiSIgVq5cs
And I’m glad to see that Michael is starting to promote LVT, although he has for years been an opponent of sado-georgists. He has always appreciated that land speculation lays at the heart of financial incontinence, but has previously been reluctant to promote the simple solution.
“It is time to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about the public status of economics as an expert discipline”
Unfortunately, economics is neither populated and practised by experts, nor its practitioners, or their theories, conclusions and prescriptions, disciplined.
Last, too many (in particular) lawyers become Chancellors of the Exchequer.
The Labour Land Campaign will be holding a fringe meeting on 1 Oct at the Labour Party Conference on “The Economics of Education and the Education of Economics”. That’s Manchester. Everyone welcome.