http://ht.ly/721u9This is an interesting critique of economics as it is currently practised. Some of the observations and conclusions are in line with those I have reached: which is a bit worrying because professionals in the field should be far in advance of anything I can work out in an amateur attempt to understand the subject. But it is positive that some economists are in fact aware of the nonsense that is the subject.
For example, I have spoken about the aping of hard science, and the attempt to present economics as if it was that kind of discipline. That much was obvious and the lie it entails was also obvious. What I had not realised until just a few days ago was the extent to which that fraud was perpertrated through actively misleading the public in the ostensibly academic part of the field. There is no better illustration of this than the realisation that there is no Nobel Prize for economics. I learned that very recently from Ha-Joon Chang's book: and I have been musing about the enormity of that since I read it. This article reiterates the knowledge and it reaches much the same conclusions as me:
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Of course, nothing says science like a Nobel Prize. Prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine were first awarded in 1901, long before anyone would have thought that economics could or should be included. But by the late 1960s, the central bank of Sweden was determined to change that, and when the Nobel family objected, the bank agreed to put up the money itself, making it the only one of the prizes to be funded by taxpayers.
Officially, then, it is known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel but that title is rarely used. On Monday morning, Prof. Sargent and Princeton University Prof. Sims were widely reported to have won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
The confusion is understandable, and deliberate, according to Philip Mirowski, an economic historian at the University of Notre Dame. It's part of the PR trick, Prof. Mirowski argues. Awarding the economics prize immediately after the prizes for physics, chemistry and medicine helps to place economics on the same level as those other natural sciences
That is outright fraud: it is nothing else. They may attempt to justify it by saying their disicipline needs a big prize: and maybe it does. But how often have you heard an economist awarded this prize denying it is a Nobel Prize? Maybe you all knew this: I didn't. I suspect many don't. And it is deliberate: it has to be. For a mistake it is too big.
My explorations of economic growth led me to the harsh conclusion that that part of macroeconomics has no content and no knowledge. Perhaps that seemed intemperate to those of you who read it. And my damning of the mathematical models might have been adequately explained by my own difficulty with numbers, and that may have led you to dismiss my views. Seems I am not alone, however: The article calls attention to a group of economics students in France a decade ago who reached the same conclusion about the whole field. And it seems that though their voices went largely unheard there is a new crop of students with the same view:
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graduate students at Columbia are growing increasingly frustrated by at the tendency to define the discipline by its tools instead of its subject matter like the students in Paris a decade ago, they find little relationship between the mathematical models in class and the world outside the door.
When influential people like Joseph Stiglitz and George Soros are saying that this discipline has no notion about what is going on, there is a problem.
When a field with clear political and social influence has no ethical standards whatsoever, and key "experts" have huge conflicts of interest, which are not admitted or taken into account in judging their prescriptions, then you do not have an academic discipline at all: you have a mafia.
Obviously there are economists who are not part of that mafia: who have raised their voices against the theft and corruption and irresponsibility which has characterised this lot for several decades. But they have been excluded from "the tribe", and their insights ignored.
Soros has set up an Institute to go back to the drawing board and try to invent a content for economics: which is much in line with my own suggestion for macroeconomists: seems that he and others think the same conclusions should be applied to the whole subject.
But I have a better suggestion. I think we should follow their own recommendations. This is a dinosaur industry with no value for the modern world at all: just like mining or ship building was said to be in 1980's Britain. We were told then there should be no support for lame duck industries and that all the people working there should be fired. It was harsh, but necessary if we were to compete in the globalised world and that those folk's lives, and the lives of their children, were irredeemably bllighted could not be a reason for holding back in any way. Well sauce for the goose.... Let the whole profession be abolished. Let every single one of them be fired and find something less harmful to do with their talents. And let those who have made fortunes through conflict of interest be prosecuted if that can be done: and subjected to confiscatory tax, along the same lines as proven drug dealers, if it can't. Let them face the consequences they have visited on millions all over the world. And let the shame of their behaviour turn into stigma so they find it just as hard to get a new job as the poor they have demonised do.
I would find something very satisfying in that. Maybe that can be one demand for OWS: cos these same plutocrats are saying OWS are not serious because they don't have a concrete programme. This is one
Edited by FionaK - 26/10/2011, 23:31
