Evening Must-Read: Robert Skidelsky: What Should Economics Professors Teach?

Robert Skidesky: Knocking the scientific halo off mainstream economists’ teaching and research: “The growing discontent of economics students…

…with the university curriculum…. Students at the University of Manchester advocated an approach ‘that begins with economic phenomena and then gives students a toolkit to evaluate how well different perspectives can explain it’…. Andrew Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, wrote the introduction…. Students have little awareness of neoclassical theory’s limits, much less alternatives to it…. The deeper message is that mainstream economics is in fact an ideology–the ideology of the free market…. The austerity policies that Europe used to fight the recession from 2010 on were based on the belief that there was no recession to fight. These ideas were tailored to the views of the financial oligarchy. But the tools of economics, as currently taught, provide little scope for investigating the links between economists’ ideas and the structures of power….

So what is keeping the mainstream’s intellectual apparatus going?… An institutional structure that… rewards orthodoxy and penalizes heresy. The great classics… from Smith to Ricardo to Veblen, go untaught…. It has become an article of faith that any move toward a more open or ‘pluralist’ approach to economics portends regression to ‘pre-scientific’ modes of thought…. Curriculum reform can… remind students that economics is not a science like physics, and that it has a much richer history than is to be found in the standard textbooks…. Indeed, mainstream economics is a pitifully thin distillation of historical wisdom on the topics that it addresses…. What students are taught today certainly does not deserve its imperial status in social thought…