[wordup] Post-autistic economics

[Adam Shand]

Via: Richard Schwartfeger <rnws at blueyonder...>
From: http://www.adbusters.org/metas/eco/truecosteconomics/post- 
autistic.html
POST-AUTISTIC ECONOMICS

Here’s what economics students in three countries are doing to put  
their professors on the defensive.

France

The university-aged children of France’s ruling class ought to have  
been contentedly biding their time. They were, after all, destined to  
move into the high-powered positions reserved for graduates of the  
elite École Normale Supérieure (ENS). “The ENS is for the very good  
students, and the very good students aren’t afraid to ask questions,”  
says Sorbonne economist Bernard Geurrien.

In Spring 2000 he addressed a conference on the disconnect between  
mainstream neoclassical economics instruction and reality. Economics  
has an ideological function, he told them, to put forth the idea that  
the markets will resolve everything. In fact, he added, economic  
theory absolutely doesn’t show that.

A group of economics students, their worst fears confirmed,  
approached Guerrien eager to “do something.” A week later, 15 of them  
gathered in a classroom to hash out a plan of attack. Someone called  
the reigning neoclassical dogma “autistic!” The analogy would stick:  
like sufferers of autism, the field of economics was intelligent but  
obsessive, narrowly focussed, and cut off from the outside world.

By June, their outrage had coalesced into a petition signed by  
hundreds of students demanding reform within economics teaching,  
which they said had become enthralled with complex mathematical  
models that only operate in conditions that don’t exist. “We wish to  
escape from imaginary worlds!” they declared. Networking through the  
internet and reaching the media through powerful family connections,  
they made their case.

“Call to teachers: wake up before it’s too late!” they demanded. “We  
no longer want to have this autistic science imposed on us.” They  
decried an excessive reliance on mathematics “as an end in itself,”  
and called for a plurality of approaches.

With that, ‘autisme-économie,’ the post-autistic economics (PAE)  
movement, was born.

Their revolutionary arguments created an earthquake in the French  
media, beginning with a report in Le Monde that sent a chill through  
the academic establishment. Several prominent economists voiced  
support and a professors’ petition followed. The French government,  
no doubt recalling the revolutionary moment of May 1968, when  
students led a 10-day general strike that rocked the republic to its  
foundations, promptly set up a special commission to investigate. It  
was headed by leading economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, who also traveled  
to Madrid to address Spain’s nascent “post-autistic” student  
movement. Fitoussi’s findings: the rebels had a cause. Most important  
to the PAE, Fitoussi agreed to propose new courses oriented to “the  
big problems” being ignored by mainstream economics: unemployment,  
the economy and the environment.

A backlash was inevitable. Several economists (notably the American  
Robert Solow from MIT), launched a return volley. What followed was  
an attempt to discredit the PAE by implying that the students were  
anti-intellectuals opposed to the “scientificity” of neoclassical  
economics. The accusations didn’t stick: the dissenters were top  
students who had done the math and found it didn’t add up.

Gilles Raveaud, a key PAE student leader, along with Emmanuelle  
Benicourt and Iona Marinescu, sees today’s faith in neoclassical  
economics as “an intellectual game” that, like Marxism and the Bible,  
purports to explain everything, rather than admitting there are many  
issues it hasn’t figured out. “We’ve lost religion,” says Raveaud,  
“so we’ve got something else to give meaning to our lives.”

Benicourt described his hope for PAE as follows: “We hope it will  
trigger concrete transformations of the way economics is taught . . .  
We believe that understanding real-world economic phenomena is  
enormously important to the future well-being of humankind, but that  
the current narrow, antiquated and naive approaches to economics and  
economics teaching make this understanding impossible. We therefore  
hold it to be extremely important, both ethically and economically,  
that reforms like the ones we have proposed are, in the years to  
come, carried through, not just in France, but throughout the world.”

United Kingdom

Raveaud and Marinescu, key French PAE student leaders, visited the  
Cambridge Workshop on Realism and Economics in the UK. “It must have  
been the right time,” says Phil Faulkner, a PhD student at Cambridge  
University. That June he and 26 other disgruntled PhD students issued  
their own reform manifesto, called “Opening Up Economics,” that soon  
attracted 750 signatures. Economics students at Oxford University,  
who had been at the same workshop, followed with their own “post- 
autistic” manifesto and website. Similar groups linked to heterodox  
(as opposed to orthodox) economics began emerging elsewhere in Europe  
and South America.

The Cambridge rebellion “was prompted by frustration,” says Faulkner,  
but they hadn’t expected such a positive reception from fellow  
students. “If anyone were to be happy about the way economics had  
gone, we’d expect it to be PhD students, because if they were unhappy  
with it, they simply wouldn’t be here. In fact, that wasn’t the case.”

As expected, Cambridge ignored them. Their efforts, Faulkner  
explains, were meant to show support for the French students and to  
use their privileged position at the esteemed economics department to  
demonstrate to the rest of the world their discontent. Some of the  
signatories worried that speaking out could have dire consequences,  
and the original letter was unsigned. “I think it’s more future  
possibilities, getting jobs, etc., that [made them think] it might  
not be smart to be associated with this stuff,” says Faulkner. He  
says he already knew that his research interests meant he would have  
to work outside of the mainstream: “There was nothing to lose really.”

Edward Fullbrook, a research fellow at the University of the West of  
England, had already launched the first post-autistic economics  
newsletter in September 2000. Inspired by the French student revolt  
and outraged by stories emerging from American campuses that courses  
on the history of economic thought were being eradicated (which he  
viewed as an effort to facilitate complete indoctrination of  
students), Fullbrook battled hate mail and virus attacks to get the  
newsletter off the ground. Soon, prominent economists such as James  
Galbraith stepped up to offer encouragement and hard copy. The  
subscriber list ballooned from several dozen to 7,500 around the world.

Fullbrook edited The Crisis in Economics, a book based on PAE  
contributions, now being translated into Chinese. Textbook  
publishers, always hunting for the next big thing, have been  
inquiring about PAE textbooks. It makes sense, says Fullbrook, since  
enrollments in standard economics classes have been dropping, cutting  
into textbook revenues. In other words, students just aren’t buying  
it. Ironically, says Fullbrook, “Market forces are working against  
neoclassical economics.”

One of his contributors is Australian economist Steve Keen, who led a  
student rebellion in 1973 that led to the formation of the political  
economy department at Sydney University. “Neoclassical economics has  
become a religion,” says Keen. “Because it has a mathematical veneer,  
and I emphasize the word veneer, they actually believe it’s true.  
Once you believe something is true, you’re locked into its way of  
thinking unless there’s something that can break in from the outside  
and destroy that confidence.”

But the neoclassical model still reigns supreme at Cambridge. Phil  
Faulkner now teaches at a university college, but is limited to  
mainstream economics, the only game in town. “If you’re into math,  
it’s a fun thing to do,” he says. “It’s little problems, little  
puzzles, so it’s an enjoyable occupation. But I don’t think it’s  
insightful. I don’t think it tells these kids about the things it  
claims to describe, markets or individuals.”

United States

Sitting in an overcrowded café near Harvard Square, talking over the  
din of full-volume Fleetwood Mac and espresso fueled chatter, Gabe  
Katsh describes his disillusionment with economics teaching at  
Harvard University. The red-haired 21-year-old makes it clear that  
not all of Harvard’s elite student body, who pay close to $40,000 a  
year, are the “rationally” self-interested beings that Harvard’s most  
influential economics course pegs them as.

“I was disgusted with the way ideas were being presented in this  
class and I saw it as hypocritical – given that Harvard values  
critical thinking and the free marketplace of ideas – that they were  
then having this course which was extremely doctrinaire,” says Katsh.  
“It only presented one side of the story when there are obviously  
others to be presented.”

For two decades, Harvard’s introductory economics class has been  
dominated by one man: Martin Feldstein. It was a New York Times  
article on Feldstein titled “Scholarly Mentor To Bush’s Team,” that  
lit the fire under the Harvard activist. Calling the Bush economic  
team a “Feldstein alumni club,” the article declared that he had  
“built an empire of influence that is probably unmatched in his  
field.” Not only that, but thousands of Harvard students “who have  
taken his, and only his, economics class during their Harvard years  
have gone on to become policy-makers and corporate executives,” the  
article noted. “I really like it; I’ve been doing it for 18 years,”  
Feldstein told the Times. “I think it changes the way they see the  
world.”

That’s exactly Katsh’s problem. As a freshman, he’d taken Ec 10,  
Feldstein’s course. “I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that Ec 10  
presents itself as politically neutral, presents itself as a science,  
but really espouses a conservative political agenda and the ideas of  
this professor, who is a former Reagan advisor, and who is  
unabashedly Republican,” he says. “I don’t think I’m alone in wanting  
a class that presents a balanced viewpoint and is not trying to cover  
up its conservative political bias with economic jargon.”

In his first year at Harvard, Katsh joined a student campaign to  
bring a living wage to Harvard support staff. Fellow students were  
sympathetic, but many said they couldn’t support the campaign  
because, as they’d learned in Ec 10, raising wages would increase  
unemployment and hurt those it was designed to help. During a three- 
week sit-in at the Harvard president’s office, students succeeded in  
raising workers’ wages, though not to “living wage” standards.

After the living wage ‘victory’, Harvard activists from Students for  
a Humane and Responsible Economics (share) decided to stage an  
intervention. This time, they went after the source, leafleting Ec 10  
classes with alternative readings. For a lecture on corporations,  
they handed out articles on corporate fraud. For a free trade  
lecture, they dispensed critiques of the wto and imf. Later, they  
issued a manifesto reminiscent of the French post-autistic revolt,  
and petitioned for an alternative class. Armed with 800 signatures,  
they appealed for a critical alternative to Ec 10. Turned down flat,  
they succeeded in introducing the course outside the economics  
department.

Their actions follow on the Kansas City Proposal, an open letter to  
economics departments “in agreement with and in support of the Post- 
Autistic Economics Movement and the Cambridge Proposal” that was  
signed by economics students and academics from 22 countries.

Harvard President Lawrence Summers illustrates the kind of thinking  
that emerges from neoclassical economics. Summers is the same former  
chief economist of the World Bank who sparked international outrage  
after his infamous memo advocating pollution trading was leaked in  
the early 1990s. “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank  
be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCS  
[Less Developed Countries]?” the memo inquired. “I think the economic  
logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country  
is impeccable and we should face up to that . . . I’ve always thought  
that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER- 
polluted . . . ”

Brazil’s then-Secretary of the Environment, Jose Lutzenburger,  
replied: “Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally  
insane . . . Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the  
unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness  
and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’  
concerning the nature of the world we live in.”

Summers later claimed the memo was intended ironically, while reports  
suggested it was written by an aide. In any case, Summers devoted his  
2003/2004 prayer address at Harvard to a “moral” defense of sweatshop  
labor, calling it the “best alternative” for workers in low-wage  
countries.

“You can’t ignore the academic foundations for what’s going on in  
politics,” says Jessie Marglin, a Harvard sophomore with share. share  
didn’t want a liberal class with its own hegemony of ideas. It wanted  
“a critical class in which you have all the perspectives rather than  
just that of the right.” Without an academic basis for criticism,  
other approaches “aren’t legitimized by the institution,” she says.  
“It becomes their word versus Professor Feldstein, who is very  
powerful.”

Harvard economics professor Stephen Marglin, Jessie’s father, teaches  
the new course. A faculty member since 1967, Marglin was the tail end  
of a generation formed by the Great Depression and World War II.  
“This generation,” he says, “believed that in some cases markets  
could be the solution, but that markets could also be the problem.”

His new course still uses the Ec 10 textbook, but includes a critical  
evaluation of the underlying assumptions. Marglin wants to provide  
balance, rather than bias.
“I’m trying to provide ammunition for people to question what it is  
about this economic [system] that makes them want to go out in the  
streets to protest it,” he says. “I’m responding in part to what’s  
going on and I think the post-autistic economics group is responding  
to that. Economics doesn’t lead politics, it follows politics. Until  
there is a broadening of the political spectrum beyond a protest in  
Seattle or a protest in Washington, there will not be a broader  
economics. People like me can plant a few seeds but those seeds won’t  
germinate until the conditions are a lot more suitable.”

The revolution is spreading. A slogan emblazoned on a wall on a  
Madrid campus, where the PAE movement has been making inroads, makes  
its case: “¡La economia es de gente, no de curvas!” – “Economics is  
about people, not curves!”

Deborah Campbell