La Trobe University is in serious financial difficulty, which is not surprising given the pressures on universities, and particularly newer universities operating in a “competitive” market that is in fact rigged in favor of the traditional sandstones (like UQ, where I work). Also unsurprising, given past experience, is the decision to make sharp cuts in the economics program. Cutting out economics to focus on business degrees seems to be a routine response of second-tier institutions. But it seems to me to be shortsighted, even in marketing terms. The presence or absence of an economics program is one of the clearest signals of whether or not an institution aspires to be in the top rank.
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John Quiggin 
The weird agenda of this government doesn’t stop there.
At my (Go8) university the engineering ARC linkage grants this round were reportedly the best in the country but in practice were bugger all. One wonders what ‘business’ means beyond creative accounting.
A second indicator is amazingly medical. Behind all the brouhaha I’m told that the most cost effective form – public health stuff – is being cut.
Heaven knows what is going through their minds except something like privatize everything and the invisible hand will solve all and achieve a pareto optimum – or some sophistry like that.
Any bets on what is next?
My money is on defence. There are plenty of mercenary models – Xe (that group of Arnie/Steven Segal/Dolf wannabes or something like that), the Gurkas (who recently illustrated their disposability), the Wild Geese (from the Bible according to Hollywood) and of course that cheap migrant labor force the Romans used (except I don’t think they ever left) – the Vandals.
These coalition guys are giving Commodus a good name.
I did a Humanities degree at La Trobe in Melbourne part time over 7or 8 years finishing about 12 years ago . The Howard assault had begun .The Humanities dept was shrinking fast and the new buildings being built were science or business related. We were having courses cut ,merged and abbreviated as the emphasis shifted to sectors more obviously vocationally oriented in the short term. Its interesting to hear that even economics is going .
I suppose once the end of history has been reached there is not much need for theory anymore .Best simply to concentrate on the task of making money.
“I suppose once the end of history has been reached there is not much need for theory anymore”
I asked a somewhat older economics professor who gave our economics class a few guest lecturers about the epistemology/ies upon which the economics was based – and he said those sort of questions had not really been looked at much in the discipline since the 1980s, for what that’s worth.
I’d be interested in anyone has started reading the UN report on decarbonisation and economic growth that has just recently come out.
I have a few concerns so far – largely to do with the positioning of anthropogenic climate change as an opportunity for a grandscale public-private partnership (which was something also raised a a recent emergency action on climate change forum I attended ) which rings ‘shock doctrine’ bells; also in that the report seems to position Australia as a place to dispose of global carbon through (so far non-proven) carbon capture and storage technology, and fails to note the other GHGs and interrelated sustainability issues . I haven’t finished the report but would be interested on thought if anyone else has been reading it ?
It is important not to accept commonplace myths about the demand for economics teaching. The demand for the dedicated economics degree at universities like La Trobe has fallen as degrees in finance and business have developed. But the demand for economics courses has not. Students recognise the value of economics courses. In 2004 the number of students doing trade theory at La Trobe was around 74. By 2012 it was 450. I wonder how many universities in Australia could boast of such enrolments in a third year trade subject! The same is true for many other units taught at La Trobe – microeconomics, econometrics to name just two. In 2012 there were more than 7000 student course enrolments in economics units at La Trobe. As a school we paid our way in terms of service payments to the university and earned a profit after doing so.
Since 2012 responsibility for teaching key courses such as statistics has been taken away from economics and the core macroeconomics and microeconomics courses have been collapsed into a single first year unit. It is these moves – not a decline in demand for economics that has created the situation at La Trobe. Planned cuts in staffing from (28 to 10) are however some of the heaviest relative to cuts across the whole university. While other business areas have been cut I agree with you that this does reduce the attractiveness of business offerings.
I disagree with the label “second tier” applied to universities such as La Trobe. It is in my view a bad way of thinking about universities. Academics and their work should be judged on the basis of what they deliver in terms of teaching and research not using some pejorative collective identity and label. On this basis of what it delivers La Trobe does pretty well in economics and in many other areas such as arts and the sciences – we add lots of value to students and do good quality research particularly compared to G8 universities which have much lighter teaching loads. The alumni (cited in the link) we have graduated cover the past 30 years are testimony to the useful role that La Trobe economics has played in Australia.
@hc
I didn’t express myself perfectly. I think that La Trobe and the other 1970-vintage universities historically have done a good job in a lot of fields. But the response of their managers to the crisis has had the effect of embracing a “second-tier” label
How about economics departments offer units on how the monetary system actually works?
That would be a step forward.
Never mind, they can get a “Macdonalds Centre for Nutrition Studies”, or maybe a “Philip Morris Memorial Faculty for Circulatory and Respiratory Research”.
The presence or absence of an economics program is one of the clearest signals of whether or not an institution aspires to be in the top rank.
Hahaha! So Aussie universities have reached the point where their seriousness is explicitly judged on how much they suck up to the ruling class? Which has been the job of the economics “discipline” for the past 40 years…
@Faustusnotes
“Hahaha! So Aussie universities have reached the point where their seriousness is explicitly judged on how much they suck up to the ruling class? Which has been the job of the economics “discipline” for the past 40 years.”
This comment could come only from a source where ‘economics’ is seen as just one subject (course) in an organisational unit named ‘business and economics’ or simply ‘business’ within an institution labelled ‘tertiary’ (ie where everything is the wrong way around).
In the 1970s at least one 1970s university did offer a unit you ask for (I know because I took it). At that time, it was much easier to offer a unit on how the monetary system “actually” works then what it would be now because at that time the institutional environment (pre the 1980s big bang deregulation) allowed a neat separation of the monetary system from finance, macroeconomics, various subject areas of microeconomics relevant for the internal operation of financial organisations.
I’ve worked and studied at G8 and 1970s universities in Australia and I studied for some time at two EU universities. I fully concur with Prof Quiggin.
The concept of a distinction between ‘top-rank’ and ‘second-tier’ institutions (what it might mean and why it might matter) is one that could stand a much deeper and more extensive analysis than I think it can be given in one blog comment, so I’m going to zero in on just one narrow aspect. If a university does (tacitly if not candidly) resign itself to being labelled and perceived as ‘second-tier’, who is hurt by that, and how? Conceivably its graduates might suffer, their ability to compete with graduates of ‘top-rank’ institutions being reduced — but then, if they were unable to gain entry to a ‘top-rank’ institution, that’s not the fault of the ‘second-tier’ institution, is it? By offering applicants a second choice (after the presumed failure), even if one labelled as inferior, the ‘second-tier’ institution is offering them a benefit, not a penalty, surely?
It’s my day for anecdotal evidence so I will continue in that vein. Last time I was in the UQ bookshop, I noticed a huge amount of shelf space devoted to management and business studies textbooks and very small amounts of shelf space devoted to the hard sciences or to medicine, economics, political economy and the arts and humanities.
I guess the best spin we can put on this is that real knowledge and timeless literature are limited but bulldust can be proliferated endlessly. Hence, the disparities I observed.
John, how do you substantiate the claim “La Trobe University is in serious financial difficulty”?
Have you looked at their annual reports for 2012 & 2013? Or just believe what university management tells you? 2013 saw profits up +50% and cash +$5million (and this was after an extra $20million paid down on debt at the last minute). Universities have operating margins better than most blue chip companies.
There is an agency problem here where VC’s are simply cutting costs to fund their glory attracting white elephants.
On Jamie’s point the NTEU dispute the claim that LTU is in serious financial difficulties. I don’t know about this but wonder why areas that are profitable are being cut. There is always the argument that “we want to do better” but that would suggest people are not working at reasonable workload levels or that the range of subjects can be cut (by more than 50% in the case of economics) without influencing demand.
Generally while universities insist that first-year students back up their arguments with logic and evidence I don’t see the same requirements being placed on administrators. A lose claim that the demand for economics has fallen that is not supported by evidence can be used as the basis for extreme actions that damage many lives.
On Iconoclast’s point I also notice the change in the character of the university bookshops. I guess they are responding to demands but something seems to have got lost. Many now sell kid’s lollies and really non-academic titles – “The 5 minute guide to physics” etc. In the maths area of the bookshop most seem to be on computer science – an important discipline no doubt but only a part of mathematics. One of the reasons I like visiting the US are the superb university bookshops that offer reference as well as textbook and popular material.
No Ernestine, it’s a comment from someone who notes that the economics field doesn’t use peer review, has very poor technical skills, can’t agree on fundamental principles, and shames itself selling propaganda for the rich. Think wegman, Reinhardt and rogoff, tol, etc.
There is no chance for example that a physicist would have to write a book dismissing zombie ideas in physics, as our host has had to do. Such poor quality thinking only exists in economics. It will be taken seriously as a discipline by the rest of academia when it stops publishing in technical reports, agrees on basic principles, and adopts the same transparency towards funding and conflicts of interest as the real sciences. Until then it is just shoddy stats and poor science, being used as propaganda for the rich.
@hc
I am very surprised that you find US university bookshops better. Most are now run by Barnes & Noble, and the books on offer are typical of the chain (Borders without the intellectual pretensions, and with a smaller range). Further, the great majority of floorspace is taken up with merchandise, mainly associated with the football team. My sample size isn’t very large, but that’s true of the several Ivy and similar status places I’ve been in the past 2 years, as well as of the smaller, less prestigious places.
Neil, I remember good bookstores at University of Chicago and around Berkeley. It was a few years back.
but no one knows where all the money in the “monetary system” is,let alone how the system actually works.
@hc
The University of Chicago bookstore is now a B&N.
@may
I’m sure that is not true. Maybe it is in the interest of certain parties that people don’t get to know. For example, Glen Stevens “took” money for the RBA from the “government” to “strengthen” the RBA’s reserves, which he admitted was mostly for cosmetic reasons.
As regards shutting down economics at LTU, I would agree with Jamie that large amounts of money are wasted by “management” in so-called strategic initiatives, which never seem to work. I recall there was a hospitality unit opened by LTU at Mt. Buller (now defunct). Other “reorganisations” like the “alignment” of Bendigo with the Bundoora campus ended in decimating staff who were doing quite well at Bendigo, etc. etc. Coalition Governments have also been chipping away at the University system since John Howard came in and they have been quite successful in hastening its ultimate demise. Only the Go8 will remain in the end, and the only really good research that will be done in Australia will be in Medicine/Biochemistry, if that. That is because they have two sources of research funding (ARC and NHMRC) rather than just the one. But then if the average voter thinks Unis are a waste of money, and the right wing encourages that perception, what can you expect?
@hc #4
Does the Latrobe management think that economics is not vocational enough for it to keep? From the TAFE side, the huge Victorian cuts in recent years have forced hurried shotgun marriages. Having taught in 2012 the TAFE economics subject which, when passed, enables students to go directly to second year economics at Latrobe, I was surprised at Latrobe’s lack of interest in the inferior (TAFE produced) textbook or control of assessment and curriculum. Certainly lower TAFE standards operate compared to first year economics at Deakin or Swinburne.
It’s a training culture not a reflective, intellectual culture in TAFE. Is going to second year uni econ subjects with their theoretical demands and esoteric content a bridge too far for them? They’d probably be keen on political economy rather than dry first year micro/macro models and confusing debates about new keynesianism, rational expections etc. Do many of the TAFE entrants make it to 3rd year economics?
This is a pity as the background of many TAFE students – refugees, mature age, full time workers, often without year 12 – can make them committed students: eager to learn, craving relevance, testing their formed worldviews.
A rigorous knowledge of mainstream economics, where it is wrong and right is crucial to developing alternatives, I think. But so is knowledge of economic history, a discipline which got dropped long ago from universities and I presume has not returned. If you don’t want to know the past, you don’t want to learn, and more importantly, you risk the future. Is there any course where students get to read about how our economic institutions developed, and what was the backdrop? I have just read John Edwards’ book about the 30s and 40s Australian debates and the significance of Curtin’s wartime economic planning which helped me understand why we are “here” economically.
@Faustusnotes
@ 15:
1. Your source is wrong in saying “the economics field doesn’t use peer review, has very poor technical skills, can’t agree on fundamental principles”
2. This thread is about the teaching of Economics at universities. Your reference to JQ’s book on Zombie ideas is irreleant (have you read the book?)
3. Physicists in the applied area of climate science did and do have to write a lot in response to the Christopher Monckton’s of this world.
And so forth.
Ernestine,
1. I cited three major recent scandals in economics, all of which were published in non peer-reviewed fora.
2. John’s book explains to laypeople how basic errors of economic theory persist. Many of the people perpetuating these basic errors are economists and he cites examples. That is surely relevant to whether economics as a discipline is organized and coherent enough to have a strong theoretical basis. The scenario he lays out is the equivalent of ,odeon laypeople and engineers continuing to believe the earth is flat and the aether real because physicists still can’t agree on basic theory.
3. Moncton is not a physicist, but a madman. Climate scientists do not have to write articles debunking dumb ideas by other climate scientists. But just recently Gelman had to school Tol in basic stats, some economics graduates had to fight to show Reinhardt and rogoff can’t use excel (which doesn’t even touch on their execrable modeling), and there was a big debate between economists (including quiggin) about the stern review because they could not agree on the basic principles of discounting. There is ample evidence (that I am presenting and you are ignoring) that economics as a discipline is shambolic.
If john had written that no university that drops underwater basket weaving can be taken seriously, everyone would laugh. But underwater basket weaving as a subject would have a more coherent underlying theory, better and more replicable results, and less corruption than modern economics. It would contribute more intellectually and morally to a capstone university degree than your average economics faculty, and do less to corrupt the institution.
The central point of this post is not just wrong -it is the diametric opposite of the correct argument, which is that after 100 years economics has proven to be academically shallow, theoretically contradictory, and deeply corrupt, and institutions of higher learning should drop it.
@Faustusnotes
None of what you say is relevant to the topic of this thread.
It’s amusing watching goalposts being moved around.
@Ernestine Gross
Ernestine
That’s not an argument for teaching relevant monetary economics. The monetary system can’t be separated from finance. The money supply is largely the liabilities of the banking sector. To teach anything else is incorrect.
@sdfc
Monetary economics is not quite the same as the “actual” monetary system (IMHO). The former is much broader than the latter in terms of relevant material. The question to which I replied was ‘how does the monetary system “actually” work. My point was that prior to the ‘big bang’ deregulation of the (international) financial system, the monetary system was a version of the Bretton Woods system, which could be easier separated (in terms of designing teaching units) from finance and macroeconomics. That is Finance as we know it today with derivatives, and other complex synthetic financial securities did not exist in the 1970s but the link to the monetary policy aspect of macroeconomics was well established (SRD ratios, various measures of ‘money supply’, Mo, M1, M3…).
As you can see from the series of BASEL measures, the ‘liability’ side of bank balance sheets is no longer a reasonably meaningful element of a notion of ‘money’.
Teaching the 1970s version of ‘monetary system’ is, IMHO, no longer adequate.
Ernestine, your comments about monetary theory are also irrelevant to the topic of this thread. The topic of this thread is that universities that want to be taken seriously should waste their money on a prestige faculty that deals in lies, intellectual dishonesty, corruption, and propaganda, and has no coherent framework for the development of knowledge within its field. Is this how you think universities should work? Do you think that academic inquiry should proceed by marshalling data and methods to prove certain pre-conceived ends at any cost, preferably in the service of the very rich? Why do you think these concepts are irrelevant to a debate about whether a university prioritizes spending cuts in a discipline that has no intellectual credibility, rather than say, any other discipline in academia?
@faustusnotes
I suggest you enrol and take a degree in Economics (not commerce) at a university which still has a School of Economics or a Faculty of Economics and then come back to comment.
@Ernestine Gross
Ernestine I don’t think you can prevent non-economists from commenting on economics – we are allowed to speak about our perception of the discipline. If our perceptions are wrong, it would be more useful to explain why.
I wouldn’t express my perception as harshly as fn, but I do perceive mainstream or free market economics as a discipline that is very different and that departs from what are generally accepted standards in knowledge formation. Specifically, in most disciplines it seems to be accepted that one forms theories and tests them against evidence (however one defines evidence, which may be ‘objective reality’ for positivists, or other subjectivities for non-positivists such as myself). In mainstream economics it appears that when theory (eg the theory that free markets best serve to maximise utility) does not fit with evidence (eg the GFC) economists will simply argue that evidence needs to be changed to fit theory.
So against positivist (reality based) arguments, economists appear to argue that the reason that markets don’t maximise utility is that they aren’t properly “free” and reality needs to be modified in order to create markets that fit the theory. On the other hand, for non-positivists such as myself, who argue that the economic theory of utility maximisation does not fit with our lived experience, economists seem to argue that we are deluded about the nature of our experience. Overall, the discipline starts to looks more like a religion than a system of knowledge.
Two problems I have heard about how economics is taught to undergraduates at even very good universities is that
1)the maths equations (econometrics?) are taught in a rote learning fashion until the end of the course when the advanced calculus they’re based upon is introduced briefly,
and 2) not enough is taught about the difference between pure maths models and the real world, and not enough attention is given to how to adjust models to specific real world conditions with a view to not causing danger, injury or harm – this is different from other applied maths eg. students learning how to design bridges must incorporate real world conditions into their design and also have a view to the safety of the infrastructure for people
The problem is not the use or non-use of Maths. The problem is the failure to form consensus about basic principles like the role of public debt, the value of trade liberalization, the economic effects of migration, or even (FFS!) the relationship between the money supply and inflation. These theoretical basics are borked because the “discipline” as a whole has been captured by the economic interests whose behavior it purports to describe. This is why Reinhardt and rogoff were fated around the world for producing a result using a model that wouldn’t pass first year undergrad stats, with a basic error in a spreadsheet they refused to share. This is why so many economists couldn’t predict the GFC. This is why the stern review sank, sabotaged by debate about how much we should value the future (something economists can’t agree on, or suddenly are unable to agree on when the consequences of the idea might threaten the interests of the fossil fuel industry). This is why Richard tol was able to use a nonsensical damage function and erroneous data in a “meta analysis” that wouldn’t pass the first stage of a cochrane review, but which conveniently defended the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Every time economic theory runs up against the interests of the powerful, it either delivers flawed models that defend the status quo, or fails to reach any worthwhile conclusions due to hot dispute over basic principles. Compare that with any real discipline in academia, and ask why universities should divert money from underwater basket weaving to fund such a wayward and shallow exercise in self-exculpating rhetoric.
@Val
“I don’t think you can prevent non-economists from commenting on economics – we are allowed to speak about our perception of the discipline.”
Non-economists are part of ‘the economy’. Therefore it is not only desirable but commonsensical that non-economists have an opinion and comment on economic matters as they observe them. However, I maintain a distinction should be drawn between observable economic matters and the content of the teaching of Economics at universities that do have Schools or Faculties of Economics (as distinct of those who offer a few subjects for commerce or business students).
This distinction arises from the empirically verifiable observations that the institutional environment (legal framework) and policies within a given legal framework and the evolution of both are determined by politicians and their advisers, only some of them have degrees in economics – a decreasing number in some places.
“I do perceive mainstream or free market economics as a discipline that is very different and that departs from what are generally accepted standards in knowledge formation.”
In my entire working life I have not come across a “free market economics as a discipline”. However, I have met an accounting-law graduate, a public sector accountant, a PhD in English Literatue, a HR Professor, to name a few examples of ‘disciplines’, and numerous commentators on this blog-site and elsewhere who talk ‘free markets’. Furthermore, I have observed that policies adopted since the late 1970s or 1980s look like a return to 18th and 19th century “mainstream” economic thought. Prof Q’s book on Zombie Economics identifies and discusses major steps in this anachronistic development of policy; anachronistic relative to the development of mainstream (academic) economics.
I would suggest, fn’s approach is a good example of how knowledge formation does not work. By fn’s logic, law should be scrapped from universities because crime persists. Accounting should be scrapped because creative accounting persists. Medicine should be scrapped because there are scandels involving medical practitioners, etc.
If someone were to say that special interest groups have managed to find people who, on the basis of their qualifications, can call themselves economists, and the result is unacceptable, then I would agree.
May I point to Prof Q’s thread on DDT to illustrate that the scientific method does not prevent similar outcomes in the world of experience.
J-D
“Conceivably its graduates might suffer, their ability to compete with graduates of ‘top-rank’ institutions being reduced.” I’m not sure I agree.
I’ve run graduate programs for a number of public and private organisations over the years (never academic roles). If anything, I’ve been less included to employ graduates from the ‘top tier’ universities as there is often a mismatch between the skills sets of their graduates and the needs of non-academic employers.
A casual observation is that the ‘top tier’ universities place too much emphasis on math that is rarely used outside academia. Their graduates might be ready to undertake a PhD in the US, but most employers don’t care if a graduate can do mathematical proofs.
What most employers are looking for are young professionals that can do something practical when posed with a real word problem, limited data, and not much time to find a solution. Can they apply economic concepts to issues like health, transport, the environment etc? Can they drive a spreadsheet? Have they already done some basic analysis of data from the ABS, ABARES etc? After all, that is what most graduates end up doing for a living.
My advice to school leavers when considering a university has always been pretty simple. If you want to finish your studies at the 3rd or 4th year, don’t want to be an academic, and want to develop knowledge and skills that is more instantly appealing to most employers, you are probably better off going somewhere like UNE or La Trobe (and include some accounting, finance and science subjects as part of your training).
If you are thinking about a career in academia or CSIRO, go somewhere like UQ or ANU.
@J-D
@Faustusnotes
Although…
And also…
@Faustusnotes
Well, apart from The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin, and Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit.
@Ernestine Gross
Well fair enough that “free market economics” isn’t a discipline – I guess I was referring to the “Chicago school” (?) which dominated the economics discipline in some times and places I believe. I have read Zombie Economics, plus several others including Steve Kean and a large introductory text for undergraduates by Hugh Stretton (who once was my lecturer in history, so I’m not sure if economics is his first discipline, but he is and was a voice of sanity).
Some of the ideas which John Quiggin dismisses as zombie ideas may still be mainstream in some economics departments, aren’t they? Isn’t that the problem? There are controversies in every discipline and public health has them also, but I still feel economics – I don’t mean ‘the economy’ but economics as a system of knowledge, we see it in the public domain – seems to have an unusually unconstrained relationship with evidence. Which doesn’t mean all economists do, of course.
Faustusnotes:
How does this sort of childish and ignorant nonsense further debate? Economics is no more (or less) corrupted by ideology and vested interests than any other social science. Ideas developed in economics have practical implications and they influence public policy. The Right understood the importance of economic ideas some time ago and that is why right wing economic think tanks were set up and generously funded by business interests a generation ago.
The genius I quote above would oblierate the many centrist and progressive economic programs in our public universities and gift unchallenged influence to the Koch Brothers etc funded “free market” think tanks … Sigh.
@Val
The conversation has become easier. I may have appeared to be dismissive in my reply to fn. If so, it was out of desparation – where does one start when goal posts are moving?
“Some of the ideas which John Quiggin dismisses as zombie ideas may still be mainstream in some economics departments, aren’t they?”
I can’t possibly know what goes on in all economics departments. However, I can say I have never come across ‘the trickle down’ theory’ in mathematical economics or any journal article I ever read. But I know the Fama-Jensen efficient market theory was severely pulled to pieces by mathematical economists on methodological grounds as far back as the 1980s. These are two examples of the zombie ideas dismissed in Prof Q’s book. Using a broad brush, these zombie ideas were never part of mainstream economics but very influential in politics.
“I don’t mean ‘the economy’ but economics as a system of knowledge, we see it in the public domain .”
The economy, as we see it in the public domain, is to a large extent the outcome of political decisions and the reporting of these decisions [1]. At times, political decisions are influenced by economists (eg Chicago school). Milton Friedman is perhaps the most well known influential economist in this regard. Milton Friedman has recanted on many of his views before he died; the article may not as yet have reached Sinclair Davidson at the IPA.
Economics, as a system of knowledge, is rather broad and it overlaps with natural science and philosophy. To provide one example, recently I learned about a research program where neuro-scientists investigate risk taking behaviour – an important subject in Economics and in practice (eg the GFC). I believe Prof Q’s point of this thread is that narrowing the subject range is not a good sign.
[1] Natural disaster impact on people and hence ‘the economy’. Most of these are not under political control.
@Ernestine Gross
I think you are right that the recanting hasn’t reached the IPA, LNP et al – and that is probably what people like fn and myself are reacting against, in a sense. The use of ‘econospeak’ to justify the politics of increasing inequality and environmental destruction has probably given economics in general a bad name – but there still remain questions about the complicity of many economists and economics departments in this process, which I think is what fn is getting at when he accuses the whole discipline of being a mere tool for the ruling class, and so on. (Sorry fn if I’m misrepresenting you, trying to write a quick response before getting on with study, as usual).
As a social historian, my particular grand theory is this:
Broadly speaking there are two ways in which societies can work, egalitarian/cooperative (democratic ideal) or hierarchical/competitive (historical inheritance of last few thousand years and the way most formal organisations still work). In the 1960s-early 80s, there were significant gains for egalitarian/cooperative movements like feminism, post-colonialism, liberation, black pride etc movements, leading to formal societal responses in the 1980s such as anti-discimination legislation. Within this context the free market/neoliberal/Chicago school of economics etc movement is actually an attempt to restore the dominance of hierarchical/competitive approaches but under the guise of individualism and merit, rather than the historical forms of patriarchy and white supremacy (even though I would guess the key advocates for it are white ruling class males).
That’s probably a bit too short hand to make sense to anyone but me at present, but if you care to comment I’d be interested in your (or anyone else’s) response to this.
and of course Thomas Piketty is a key example that not all economists support increasing inequality/ruling class dominance – interested to know what fn thinks about Piketty?
I haven’t read Piketty, but Pr Ross Garnaut is participating in a talk on Piketty in August
http://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/4237-a-public-conversation-on-the-piketty-phenomenon
Tim, smolin’s book is about string theory, no? That is not a zombie theory. A zombie theory in physics would be the continuing presence of e.g. The ether in serious public discourse, and at least a minority of physicists supporting the theory. Ditto for e.g mainstream physicists rejecting or fundamentally misunderstanding QM.
In economics we see this all the time. E.g Quiggin himself discussed and debated discounting extensively after the release of the stern review, because serious economists can’t agree on the principles underlying discounting. At Crooked Timber there was extensive discussion of heterodoxy vs. orthodoxy, and Quiggin himself refuses to debate modern monetary theory. The failure of economics as a discipline to come to terms with the basic properties of money, and the continuing insistence of mainstream economists that printing money is bad, is the economics equivalent of physicists refusing to accept relativity.
The fact that macroeconomics still relies on shallow definitions of economic growth is another example of this. In health economicsextensive efforts have been made to find ways to quantify uncertainty in incremental cost effectiveness ratios, without any recognition of their fundamental mathematical silliness -even the guys who invented the idea have yet to come to terms with the impossibility of defining a confidence interval, or the fact that one value can have two diametrically opposed meanings. Where would physics be today if it hadn’t yet worked out robust basic measures for things like heat and movement, and couldn’t agree on the effects of heat flow? This is where economics stands at the moment.
Ernestine’s response is indicaticve, too, of the problems in economics. He refuses to answer a single example I have made – presumably he thinks Reinhardt and rogoff’s incompetence and the way they were lauded by mainstream economics does not reflect on his profession? And the special way that bad economic ideas remain in mainstream social and political discourse is everyone’s fault but the economists? No need for reflection there, just refuse to even discuss MMT and tell anyone who thinks economics has shallow foundations that they need to go and get a degree. Imagine if global warming scientists responded to skeptics with such arrogance!
And for the record, I didn’t recommend defunding economics, I just said it is not necessary for a uni to be taken seriously, so why not defund it if the alternative is losing a useful course, like basket weaving. And even here the response is telling – uniquely, it’s not the responsibility of the economics profession to become less corrupt and compromised, but of leftists to join the battle of ideas to “save” economics from well funded think tanks!
Imagine if medicine had taken that approach after the thalidomide scandal…
@ZM
sounds interesting, I’ve booked to go. I’ve only read the first chapter of Piketty yet, but will have to read the rest now!
thanks for that
@Faustusnotes
“He”?
I’m surprised Val didn’t jump on that one. 😉
One wonders if there is any point in addressing Faustusnotes’ self-important onanism and deliberate misrepresentations of fact. I’ll simply make a couple of points:
– economics is a social science and none of the social sciences have any any broad commonly accepted foundational knowledge. There is, for example, no unified theory of power in political science. Moreover, the idea that any such unified and commonly accepted theory would be a good thing is absoluetly horrifying.
– contra FN’s nonsense, all the hard sciences shame themselves as they are periodically plagued by poor research, irrational biases, personal squabbles and the like. The last Nobel Prize for Chemistry winner was sacked, pilloried and ostrascized by figures like Linus Pauling before his work on quasicrystals was accepted. The ongoing debate in Paleo regarding Flores Man is often unedifying, to say the very least. Then of course there is outright fraud, . Piltdown Man etc…
– The claim that RR was “lauded by mainstream economics” is an obvious falsehood, in fact many if not most economists were not persuaded and contra FN’s right-wing conspiracy nonsense, most surveys show economists are roughly evenly divided between left and right. This contrasts with its sister social science, sociology, which is almost a dead hand of left wing conformity.
– What’s with the passive-aggressive attacks on John re MMT? John has told us what he thinks about MMT. If he choses not to revisit the issue on his blog every time an anonymous punter such as yourself turns up so be it.
@Tim Macknay
ha ha yeah I saw it, thought about a polite comment to the effect that Ernestine is usually a female name!
@Watkin Tench
Well I think if you were trying to appear even-handed, this was a mistake!
we on the left can have just as many arguments as anyone else you know! (but they’re better)
@Jim
I’m not sure whether you think any of that in any way contradicts any suggestion I was making, which in turn makes me suspect that I have failed to make my point clear enough. I’ll try again.
John Quiggin wrote: ‘The presence or absence of an economics program is one of the clearest signals of whether or not an institution aspires to be in the top rank.’
Should every institution aspire to be in the top rank? Why?
Sorry about the gender mistake, I was guessing the gender from a vague memory of a name in air wolf.
Growth in a time of debt has been cited 889 times since 2010, including in text books, so don’t tell me it hasn’t been influential and hasn’t been feted. It was also cited by Paul Ryan, George Osborne and the euro economics commissioner, who has a decidedly economics-leaning PhD. Ryan also has a degree in economics… I guess commenters here will focus on the fact that Ryan is an idiot rather than on the 889 citations r&r received in just four years, primarily from economists, for a clearly flawed study that told everyone what they wanted to hear.
Also casting economics as a social science is all well and good, but it is not the same as the study of human culture. It should at the very least have a commonly accepted set of principles and a common framework for understanding money! which is a slightly more coherent and definable physical quantity than “power”, and yet the discipline can’t agree on basic ideas about the foundations of modern financial and banking processes. When you cast this as impossible, you are setting an incredibly low bar for this discipline and opening the way for frauds and shonksters to pick sides in theoretical debate that enable them to say whatever suits their paymasters. Which is exactly what they do.