Aditya Chakrabortty wrote a characteristically acute and provocative column in yesterday’s Guardian about the sorry state of economics. Often I agree with him wholeheartedly, but not this time, not entirely.
There is certainly a need to reform the economics curriculum, as demanded by the wonderfully engaged students in the University of Manchester’s Post-Crash Economics group or in Rethinking Economics. This is why I’m enthusiastically helping Professor Wendy Carlin of UCL in her newly-launched project to develop a wholly new undergraduate curriculum – the launch workshop is taking place next Monday. I’ve been advocating curriculum reform since before the crisis – in [amazon_link id=”0691143161″ target=”_blank” ]The Soulful Science[/amazon_link] – because students have not been taught much or any of the most important recent developments in economics, from behavioural models to randomised control trial methodology. What’s more, as Michael Joffe of Imperial College points out in an article in the current Royal Economic Society newsletter, undergraduate textbooks often contain factual inaccuracies – he picks on the conventional model of the ‘U-shaped’ average cost curve. No serious subject allows textbooks to be just wrong.
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There is also a strong whiff of denialism among some economists – mainly, I would say, in American universities and right-wing think tanks. There are people who do not see the crisis as any reason to reflect on how they believe the economy works. This is hard to understand – it calls for a psychologist, perhaps, or needs explaining in terms of the defence of institutional privilege. But the denialists are a minority, even though buttressed by the huge institutional inertia in the academic world, which rewards people for doing what they’ve always done and allows them to pat each other on the back for being so similar to themselves.
Where I part company with Aditya’s column and other similar responses is in the turn to the heterodox, the people for whom the mainstream will always be wrong. The column, and a list of its anti-economics economics books Verso put out in response, both highlight Philip Mirowski’s new book [amazon_link id=”1781680795″ target=”_blank” ]Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste[/amazon_link]. I’ve got a review coming out in Antipode soon – for now, I’ll just say it’s a polemic, not a work of serious scholarship. It doesn’t have anything interesting to say about the state of economics.
[amazon_image id=”1781680795″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown[/amazon_image]
Chris Dillow as always is a must-read on this question of how to be critical of economics without jumping the shark. Noah Smith earlier this year blogged in a similar vein – his target was the cult of Steve Keen, rather than Philip Mirowski. Alex Marsh has a new response to Chris Auld on this same question – what distinguishes good from bad criticism of economics? Interestingly, he suggests that internal critique is palatable while external critique is not – the old business about who is allowed to make the jokes. I’m sure there’s some of that, and have been introspecting for evidence of defensiveness. However, I don’t think that’s all it is.
The problem with so many critiques of economics is that they have the same flaw they see in the mainstream, namely abstraction. The critics have a different mental model of the world. They want economics to adopt their worldview. What it really needs, instead, is to move away from abstraction and engage deeply with evidence – both in terms of data collection and econometrics, and non-quantitative evidence in the shape of history and context. The future for a revived economics will be in becoming a deeply, genuinely empirical subject, not a playground for competing political philosophies.