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Jesse's Café Américain
Interesting piece, but what was most interesting was that it is from Forbes, 'the Capitalist Tool' business magazine, and not Rolling Stone or Mother Jones. Economics certainly is a 'disgraced profession' that is largely in denial, but it has good company in politicians, accountants, business CEOs, bankers, and regulators.
Forbes
Economists' Malign Influence on Taxes
By Lee Sheppard
May 3, 2012If Occupy Wall Street supporters are looking for new places to protest, they might think about picketing the economics departments of the most prestigious American universities.
Not only would they find a more convivial place to camp than an ugly concrete slab in lower Manhattan, but protesting at universities would serve two purposes.
First, those who are unemployed and burdened with non-dischargeable student debt - which now exceeds U.S. consumer debt -could make a point about the inutility and expense of American higher education.
Second, and more important, protesters could confront another group of elites who are responsible for the financial meltdown and have yet to apologize: the nation's academic economists.
Free market economic "literature" as economists call it - and their papers frequently are works of fiction - gave succor and intellectual respectability to the decades of deregulation and tax cuts that have bankrupted the country. Congress is compromised, to be sure, but lobbyists and members need economic studies as cover for what they are doing.
The United States is a plutocracy, with an income and wealth distribution that rivals South America's worst cases, but economists refuse to acknowledge that these outcomes are attributable to ill-advised public policies on taxation, regulation, trade, and education spending over the last several decades.
Economists bleat about "globalization" as though it were inevitable rather than a set of deliberate policy choices. Markets are political creations, so results produced by them are not inviolable or free from question. And they don't always produce equilibrium...
Read the rest at Forbes.
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A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy.
– Milan Kundera
Imagine a world where everyone could read everyone else's thoughts. There would be no privacy, of course, and no trust. We would all know what each other were thinking and would act accordingly. We would not be able to hide certain thoughts we had about others – and we would be aware of every intention others had toward us.
In Milan Kundera's seminal novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being he explores privacy in great detail. Teresa – one of the novel's main characters – is a deeply traumatised young woman. When she was growing up her mother allowed her absolutely no privacy and this invasion of her personal space haunted her into her adult life, colouring all her relationships.
Kundera:
Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.
Kundera cleverly uses Teresa's psychology to raise questions about what it means to lead a private life as a dissident under Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s. The authorities there secretly record dissident's personal conversations in order to broadcast on the radio; they trick dissidents into sexual encounters which they videotape and then report in the media. In modern democratic societies, we have institutions in place that do this, but they leave citizens alone and focus on celebrities (who, naturally, none of us sympathise with).
Kundera:
When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
But the life of a dissident in the Soviet Union or the celebrity in a Western democracy would be nothing compared to a person living in a telepathic society. Toward the end of 1984 George Orwell makes the convincing case that we are still free when our thoughts are still our own. A person living in a telepathic society would not even have ownership over their own thoughts, which would be broadcast at every moment to everyone around them.
Tragically, there are indeed some who live in such a world. They are not telepathic, of course, but they may come to think that they are. These are people who psychiatrists refer to as suffering from a severe and usually chronic form of psychosis: paranoid schizophrenia.
The most famous case of paranoid schizophrenia in the case literature is that of Daniel Paul Schreber – a high profile judge who lived in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. Schreber is famous in part because his case was picked up on by Sigmund Freud, but his case was only picked up because it was so fascinating. Schreber – a highly gifted and intelligent writer – wrote a long book about what he had experienced while in the throes of paranoid schizophrenia.
Here is a good characterisation of the role of telepathy in the Schreber case by the psychoanalyst Michael Vannoy Adams, taken from his book The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination:
[T]he essence of the 'paranoid style' is rampant, pervasive suspicion. Paranoid schizophrenics are suspicious that someone might 'influence' them. In just this way, Schreber suspects that his psychiatrist's 'nerves' might influence his 'nerves' – that is, murder his soul or destroy his reason. Schreber believes that his psychiatrist has exerted the influence of telepathy. He assumes that his psychiatrist is attempting to read his thoughts for the purpose of, as he says, "appropriating his mental powers." In order to defend himself, Schreber pretends that he is demented – that he has no thoughts that his psychiatrist might read. This is what Schreber means by "the so-called not-thinking-of-anything-thought.
Schreber's delusional state, then, puts Teresa's neuroticism and totalitarian state/celebrity culture invasion of privacy in their proper light. The latter are bad; but they're not that bad.
In cases of paranoia, as the psychic structure disintegrates various last gasp defences are often summoned up. In cases where telepathy plays a role a typical manifestation of this is that the sufferer begins to think that they can read the thoughts of others. By assuming that one can read the thoughts of others, one insulates oneself from the notion that others might be reading one's own thoughts. This gives the sufferer a defence with which they can (usually temporarily) control the disorder and maintain some sort of control over the world around them.
And this brings us to the case of John Forbes Nash Jr. Nash – who many will remember from the film (or the book on which it was based) A Beautiful Mind, which depicted his struggles with paranoid schizophrenia – played perhaps the most significant role in the development of post-war neoclassical economics.
On October 12th 1950, Nash delivered a paper on game theory to the Cowles Commission – a group of mathematical economists who were intent on formalising the discipline. What Nash gave this audience was a means to close off the theoretical edifice of neoclassical economics once and for all – something that previous generations of neoclassicals had been unable to do and which leading figures like John von Neumann and John Maynard Keynes had essentially declared impossible.
Nash employed some fancy mathematics to do this, of course, but, like all applications of mathematics, it was in the assumptions buried within the equations where the truly relevant assumptions lay.
First Nash assumed a fearful and paranoid universe where everyone was constantly scrutinising each other and weighing up what each would do next. In Nash – as in any paranoid universe – there was a total elimination of trust. In their book Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World the economists Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Haveli and Nicholas Theocrakis, put it as such:
Nash proves that bargainers [that is, economic agents] will only settle for an equilibrium of fear agreement and then proves that there exists only one such agreement: his solution to the bargaining problem. [Authors' emphasis]
In his book Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, the historian of economic ideas, Philip Mirowski, ties this directly to the 'paranoid style', as portrayed by Vannoy Adams above:
The Nash solution concept was not a drama scripted by Luigi Pirandello or a novel by Robert Musil; it was much closer to a novella by Thomas Pynchon. Just as von Neumann's minimax solution is best grasped as the psychology of the reluctant duelist, the Nash solution is best glossed as the rationality of the paranoid. Nash appropriated the notion of a strategy as an algorithmic program and pushed it to the nth degree.
From these paranoid premises where all trust is eliminated and all action taken on the basis of perpetual fear, Nash then slips in an assumption that completes the circle and makes his vision of the economic agent truly in line by assuming telepathy on the part of the actor. From Modern Political Economics:
[Nash's proof] only holds water if we can assume that [the economic agents] can potentially share common knowledge of the probability of no agreement [taking place when one agents threatens another]. But how can they, given that [each agent] has an incentive to overrepresent it [in order to strengthen their bargaining position]? As rationality alone cannot bring about such common knowledge, something closer to telepathy is necessary.[Author's emphasis]
Or, Mirowski again:
In the grips of paranoia, the only way to elude the control of others is unwavering eternal vigilance and hyperactive simulation of the thought processes of the Other. Not only must one monitor the relative 'dominance' of one's own strategies, but vigilance demands the complete and total reconstruction of the thought processes of the Other – without communication, without interaction, without cooperation – so that one could internally reproduce (or simulate) the very intentionality of the opponent as a precondition for choosing the best response. An equilibrium point is attained when the solitary thinker has convinced himself that the infinite regress of simulation, dissimulation, and countersimulation has reached a fixed point, a situation where his simulation of the response of the Other coincides with the other's own understanding of his optimal choice. Everything must fit into a single interpretation, come hell or high water.[My emphasis]
Welcome to the concentration camp in which telepathy reigns and all privacy melts into ether!
We should, of course, take this as a powerful critique of the game theoretic foundations of modern neoclassical doctrine – foundations which were then built upon by Nobel prize winners Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu and many others. But we should also see this as something more.
Those who came before Nash recognised that the economy – inhabited as it is by people whose decisions are impossible to pin down – cannot be wholly reduced to some model or others. Keynes' theories were the most eloquent expression of this, but even von Neumann who did develop game theoretic and general equilibrium models which he deployed for the purpose of economic explanation recognised the limits of this axiomatic way of portraying a capitalist economy. And yet, after the war, the neoclassicals pursued their closed, autistic models with gusto.
What we should see in this example is something about the very nature of trying to apply mathematical models to systems that are created and inhabited by humans. Modelling these systems is equivalent to trying to model those around us. And while many neoclassicals (we hope) would not try to write equations to explain their spouse's or their child's behaviours, they seem perfectly content to do so for everybody else – absurdity be damned!
knowbuddhauWhat a fascinating article, much obliged. I'm endlessly fascinated by the interplay between economics and psychology. What passes for both, sadly, isn't as scientific as proponents claim.
A bachelor of psychology myself, I'm struck by the implications for reductivist, APA-style thinking. The lesson of this article: foundational assumptions matter; speaks to the foundational assupmtions of Western academic psychology.
It reminds me of what I learned years ago from an article in the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, c 1979: "Ojective Psychology: A case of epistemological sleight-of-hand," by G. M. Kinget.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like most of us even to this day, the early psychologists were probably overwhelmed by the triumphs of technology which they, again like most of us, may have mistaken for science–thereby confusing "what works" with "what is understood" (Needleman, 1975; Barzun, 1964; passim). What impelled Wundt was an understandable impatience with speculative pronouncements about psychological processes and a corresponding urge for factual knowledge. For this he remains eminently deserving of credit. Boldly breaking with tradition, he declared psychological phenomena as being natural, not supernatural or somehow non-natural, hence he attempted to study them naturaliter, i.e., empirically. Wundt, however, vastly overshot his methodological mark. Apparently forgetting that experimental techniques are only part of the empirical approach, he by-passed the initial, reflective, and observational phases of the process to start with its very last, experimental phase–which can rightly be broached only after the possibilities of the former are exhausted. What spoiled Wundt's and his followers' endeavor was, it seems, their obsession with the reigning physical model and their sense of urgency. Few apparently ever stopped to ask the crucial epistemological question, to wit: whether the phenomena of consciousness, though doubtlessly natural, are natural in the same sense as the phenomena studied by the natural sciences.
This epistemological neglect and resulting methodological error were responsible for the early psychologists' natural-science choice of an approach to their subject matter and for the physicalistic-quantitative techniques which they imposed upon, rather than fitted to, the phenomena. (In fairness to the all-too-long maligned Wundt, it should be mentioned that he himself promptly recognized the application of the experimental method to psychology as being sharply limited, suited only to elementary, hence largely sensory phenomena. Where higher processes such as those of conceptualization and language are concerned, Wundt insisted throughout the seven volumes of his Völker Psychologie that such processes can be studied only via the "techniques of historical and naturalistic observation and also of logical analysis" (Blumenthal, 1975, p. 1082)–which, incidentally, amounts very largely to the use of the phenomenological approach. However, this choice of approach and of techniques amounts to introducing an ideology under the cloak of methodology–the mechanistic, Newtonian ideology which dominated 19th century thinking. The central assumption of this crypto-ideological methodology is the belief that psychological phenomena can be studied in the same way as physico-chemical phenomena, for it implies that, while phenomena differ in their manifestations, they are nevertheless identical in their nature, or sufficiently similar, to justify equating them.
Kinget, G. M. (1979). Objective psychology: a case of epistemological sleight-of-hand. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 11, 83-86.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~That is, in the laudable effort to make their field more scientific, and to land positions in the blossoming field, early psychologists effectively reduced the baby out of the bathwater.
Kinget goes on to describe how, in 1956, none other than Robert Oppenheimer warned the APA convention against reducing psychology to an outdated version of physics. But they did it anyway.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Psychology's attempt at independence thus amounts to breaking away from one field, philosophy, only to subject itself blindly to the methodological and epistemological dictates of another, physics, with equally sterile effects upon the refugee-discipline. Almost a quarter-century after Robert Oppenheimer's warning at the 1956 APA convention that the worst thing psychology might do would be "to model itself after a physics which is not there anymore, which has been outdated" (p. 134)*, almost all of psychology continues to fashion itself basically upon variations of this moribund model. [*Oppenheimer, R. Analogy in science. American Psychologist, 1956, 11, 127-135. In Kinget, G.W. (1979).]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Not surprisingly, reducing us humans to Newton's famous "balls-on-a-billiard-table" model has had tragic repercussions. Much of the trouble of present day APA-style psychology, which is by no means the only one available, traces back to the over-zealous reduction of the study of the human psyche to Newtonian physics.
IOW, the homonculus of APA-style psychology is a Newtonian voodoo doll.
As a psych student at U. Washington in the mid 80s, I was told that psychology's motto was "to predict and control human behavior." What about understanding? I can predict and control the behavior of my computer, but I hardly understand it.
It wasn't until my senior year, too late to bail out, that I learned of the so-called "crisis in social psychology."
Not coincidentally, APA has helped DOD develop methods of human torture. Alone among organizations for health professionals, APA's leaders think they have the power to keep torture "sage, legal, ethical and effective."
Further reading:
http://www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens/video1.phphttp://www.psysr.org/blog/2010/08/15/the-cias-torture-research-program/
JamesW
A very intelligent and thoughtful article, my only criticism being the citing of Milan Kundera - one of the most depressing authors I've ever read, and once again I'm depressed.
I like Max Lerner's summation of Thorstein Veblen's implied definition of economics:
"An apology for differential income inside a system of arbitrary and disfunctional ownership."
CR
I offer a real life example of how game theory gets used as a tool and a rationalization–
When Reagan was elected governor in 1966, he and his ilk had been very busy demonizing the University system for over twenty years as a haven for commies and other undesirables (minorities, inconvenient women). Cleaning up the Universities was a centerpiece of his campaign, red meat for voters upset with the civil rights movement, war protesters, disrespectful youth, etc.,etc., etc.
The process of defunding the Universities was one of Reagan's big projects. Universities had to be downsized because of defunding. Since professors were protected by tenure they couldn't be fired one by one very easily, but it was possible to eliminate whole departments, and that is what happened. Critics eliminated in one fell swoop.
At the University in the town where I lived at the time, the President was asked to resign by the chancellor and the replacement the hiring committee chose was disregarded and the chancellor's hand picked choice installed.
The first order of business for the hatchet man recruited from Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, an intelligence research specialist in game theory, was to cull out non-cooperative administrators from those who would willingly assist him. His method was to tutor all the ambitious, young men, administrators and professors who attended his Sunday Afternoon Salons in game theory. Others were not promoted or harassed out.
The new president had to destroy the collegial, humanistic culture of the university community and its traditional use of democratic processes and consultation. He taught his cool kids distain for such moldy institutional practices. Game theory allowed the cool kids to win and be winners and never mind the eviseration of the school and it's culture. It was glamorous, it was cutting edge. The president's acolytes became completely amoral and didn't suffer for the damage inflicted on their colleagues, because it wasn't germane to their brief.
When the president moved on to bigger and better things, he left behind a seething, sociopathic, viper's nest. No one could trust anybody. Suspicion, gridlock, and being blindsided from on high became the norm, a real hell on earth.
Sound familiar? This nonsense is all pervasive in society today. It is systemic.
Its time people, to say no, to make a new social contract. There is not much more left to lose and I don't mean just material things.
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naked capitalism
Rod Hill and Tony Myatt are Professors of Economics at the Department of Social Science at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Their new book, The Economics Anti-Textbook is available from Amazon. They also run a blog at www.economics-antitextbook.com.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington.
Philip Pilkington: Your book seems to me a much needed antidote to the mainstream economics textbooks and can either be read alone or together with them. I think that's a great approach because it allows students to become familiar with what is being taught in the classroom but also allows them to take a critical perspective on this material. So, let's start with the format of these textbooks. In the book you say that they "cloak themselves in an aura of objectivity". You then relate this to the fact that economics is not a value-free discipline and contains necessary ideological judgements. Could you talk about this a bit?
Tony Myatt: That's correct. We say the texts cloak themselves with an aura of objectivity while at the same time implicitly (and repeatedly) making value judgements that reflect a particular ideology. Indeed, one of our main objectives in our Anti-Textbook is to provide overwhelming evidence of that. We believe that students subjected to the mainstream textbooks sense the bias in those texts (and the courses that rely on them) and it turns them off. They realize they are being sold something. They don't like being bamboozled. Evidence for this is provided by the recent walkout from Mankiw's introductory economics course. Even though the students could not elaborate very clearly the nature of the bias (in the letter they wrote explaining their actions), which unfortunately made them seem quite naive, those students were correct that the bias is there. One might say they intuitively sensed it.
Delightfully for us, Mankiw replied to these students in his New York Times column, saying "I don't view the study of economics as laden with ideology…It is a method rather than a doctrine….a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions." Notice the wording he uses, "correct conclusions." If there were "correct conclusions" to be drawn from using the economic method of thinking, there would be a consensus among economists on most positive economic questions. And while the mainstream texts always claim that such a consensus exists, the evidence suggests otherwise. I'm not just talking here about the profession's response to the financial meltdown and the ongoing economic crisis, but even more mundane questions such as the effect on unemployment of an increase in the minimum wage. So, Mankiw is simply showing his own bias by implicitly claiming a consensus, by saying there are "correct" conclusions to be drawn.
Our perspective is that there is an ideology that pervades mainstream economics, especially in the way it is currently practiced and taught. There is an important point here: that we can distinguish between neoclassical economics itself, and the mainstream practice and teaching of neoclassical economics.
The point is that it is more difficult to argue that there is a bias in neoclassical economics itself. The neoclassical paradigm is remarkably malleable. It is capable of transforming itself, of shedding many an unappealing feature in the hands of 'this analyst' or 'that analyst' or 'this paper' or 'that paper'. Moreover, the boundaries of mainstream neoclassical economics are blurry. It is not clear, for example, whether recent work on 'limited rationality' lies within the neoclassical paradigm or is a direct assault upon it. As another example, the work on imperfect information by Joseph Stiglitz overthrows many of the neoclassical presumptions about the efficiency of otherwise competitive markets, and the harmfulness of government intervention, and we see his work as being squarely within the neoclassical paradigm. One could even use neoclassical economics to show the importance of community ties and social cohesion, even though in the normal practice and teaching of neoclassical economics these things are totally ignored.
That's why we called our book an "Anti-Textbook". The mainstream textbooks are remarkably uniform and do reflect a narrow range of world views. This is a much easier target to attack. And the mainstream textbooks do reflect the core beliefs of mainstream economists that inform their policy prescriptions.
Your question to us was to explain why we feel economics is not a value-free discipline and necessarily contains ideological judgements. We can answer that question. But first, to understand what we did in our book, let's answer the easier question of why textbooks must necessarily contain ideological judgements.
The textbooks necessarily contain ideological judgements because they are necessarily selective. They must include and emphasize some things and exclude or downplay others. They ask certain questions and not others. They place some topics and questions in the forefront, and put others in the background or leave them out entirely. Those decisions reflect implicit value judgements about what is interesting and important. No 'objective' account is possible. For most people – including many economists – this is not a controversial claim.
So, our methodology, our way of getting around the amorphous nature of the neoclassical paradigm, is to focus on the mainstream neoclassical textbooks themselves. We point out their biases of omission and commission. We notice when claims are made without any supporting evidence, or when the so-called evidence is irrelevant or out of date. We notice when two thirds of the text assumes perfectly functioning markets which prohibits (by assumption) the importance of power.
This focus on the textbooks does not mean that we feel there is no bias in neoclassical economics itself. Far from it. Every approach has a bias just as all economists have a bias. Our perspective is that it's best to acknowledge that fact at the outset. But I've said enough. Better let Rod have a turn…
PP: The issue of power is an interesting one. I think what many students who feel instinctively critical of economics courses note from the outset is that the theories taught imply some sort of level playing field. Yet, you would have to be blind not to notice divisions of class and race in even the most prosperous societies. Could you talk about this a bit?
Rod Hill: I think power is central to understanding the reality of economic life. For that reason, it's important that it be effectively obscured in the principles texts as students are taught how to 'think like an economist'. The texts typically manage this very well, although I'm sure their authors have no conscious intention to set out to do this. (This remarkable aspect of our propaganda system helps to make it so effective.)
The texts do indeed imply a sort of 'level playing field' between buyers and sellers in both markets for goods and services as well as in the labour market. This follows from the central place that's given to the supply and demand model (which is "short-hand" for the perfectly competitive market).
There, everyone is a 'price taker'. There is no room for businesses to use their bargaining power to squeeze workers' wages, to prevent workers from unionizing, to force down their suppliers' prices, or to raise their selling prices once they've eliminated their competition. (Think Walmart.)
But 'market power', the ability to push the price away from a hypothetical competitive level, is just the tip of the power iceberg. At least the texts acknowledge this form of power, even if they downplay it. If students think for themselves, they could realize the practical irrelevance of the perfectly competitive market structure. More likely, at least with those who stick with economics, they will start to see the world as composed of competitive markets, regardless of their actual structure. Indeed, some textbooks explicitly justify this by asserting that most markets are 'competitive enough' to be approximated by perfect competition.
Most aspects of power remain discreetly out of sight in the texts, even though, as you say, you'd have to be blind not to see them in real life. I like to paraphrase a line from Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly: the texts can't tell you what to think, but they can tell you what to think about.
So while they focus students' attention on these powerless markets, they say little or nothing at all about the power of the wealthy, or the businesses they own, and how they can influence the 'rules of the game'. As Ha-Joon Chang reminds us in the first chapter of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, there is no such thing as a 'free market': all market exchange takes place within a set of rules and institutions and those matter to market outcomes. But any serious discussion of what determines them would draw attention to the links between economic and political power. It would also provide an extra reason to be concerned about the rapid growth of economic inequality in many countries.
In the world of the texts, the managers of profit-maximizing firms allegedly spend all their time trying to hire the right combinations of labour and capital while spending no time trying to increase profits by influencing laws and regulations. In the world of reality, small armies of lobbyists and corporate lawyers work to do just that, even helpfully drafting laws for busy legislators whose political campaigns they help to finance.
Incidentally, the one notable exception to this in the texts is the discussion of regulating monopoly. The story is that regulators are often 'captured' by the industry they are supposed to regulate so that with government screwing up (as it often does in textbook examples) no regulation might be the better option. An ideologically convenient story!
Other aspects of power are also absent. The firm is largely treated as a black box, so authoritarian relations within it are ignored; questions of economic democracy do not arise. The analysis of trade and foreign investment ignores the effects of the relative power of different countries.
I can't prove how all this affects students. But in my own case I feel I was effectively blinded for an embarrassingly long time to many of these obvious aspects of the world.
PP: And how do you think the textbooks go about hiding these sorts of assumptions?
Rod Hill: In a way, I think the texts hide these assumptions in plain sight while using the magician's trick of focussing the students' attention elsewhere. When the supply and demand model is introduced, the texts don't stress the unrealistic assumptions of the perfectly competitive model (perfect costless information, no geography so that all transactions take place on the head of a pin, no one has any power over prices, no product differentiation). In part, this is because these are deemed to be not important for the questions being asked.
Students' attention is directed to questions where the model's predictions seem to accord with common sense: demand goes up, prices rise; costs go up, prices rise, and so on. The student might think this looks plausible and, for much of the text and the course, it's the only game in town.
But the model also predicts 'no advertising', 'no political contributions by firms', 'little or no research and development spending', 'all sellers sell identical goods for the same price' , and 'people doing the same work get the same wages' in the labour market. However, no questions about those things are asked, so the predictions are not confronted by the evidence that would refute them. Students would have to figure this out for themselves. And not coincidentally, these questions also raise issues of power: firms' power over consumers, firms' power in the political arena, firms' power over their workers.
So independent-minded students could ask these questions, but (unless they stick around long enough to go to graduate seminars) they are not shown any way of thinking about them in their principles of economics class.
Tony Myatt: And I'd add to that it's not just a question of emphasis – that the texts assume perfectly competitive markets for three quarters of the book. It's also a question of placement and progression. The usual progression is an early chapter on methodology, which emphasizes that the realism of assumptions doesn't matter – it's predictive power that matters. This is followed by a section often called 'How Markets Work', which applies demand and supply to every conceivable type of market. If students are paying attention they might notice that the results of these applications are usually treated as facts – not predictions that need to be tested against the evidence – and certainly not treated as predictions that need to be compared against the predictions of alternative models. And this is a real irony: having sold the student on the unimportance of the realism of assumptions and the overriding importance of predictive power, the texts don't follow their own methodology. They never take the business of comparative model testing seriously. And for practicing economists, we know that's where the real fun begins.
Emphasizing (or assuming) perfect competition is the same as assuming away power because in this market structure there are no 'large' market participants who can exercise influence over either market outcomes or political outcomes. Neither buyers nor sellers have influence over prices. Sellers are small and lean, just covering their costs. On their own, they lack resources and the incentive to lobby politicians. Such firms would also lack resources to invest heavily in research and development. And this is another irony, because technological change is the one thing that you could say capitalism has done well. Yet, the texts emphasize a market structure that is incapable of explaining this exact feature!
PP: You say that no alternative models are taught in the classroom. I've heard this criticism raised many times before and it has always struck me as rather strange. In just about every other social sciences class it is a prerequisite that the lecturer teach the major different approaches, to do otherwise would be considered biased. In your opinions, how do economists get away with this where others cannot?
Tony Myatt: Well, we need to be careful here. Other models of market structure besides perfect competition are taught. Monopoly, monopsony, imperfect competition, and oligopoly are all taught. But they are placed towards the end of the book. Later, when we need to explain the distribution of income, or the benefits of trade, the texts return to assuming perfect competition, to the demand and supply framework, as if that intervening stuff never happened. The argument is that perfect competition is simpler, and is good enough as a first approximation to all markets. But perfect competition is actually a lot more complicated than monopoly. Why not apply monopoly as a first approximation? But that would have a huge ideological impact. It would mean that power, cronyism, and exploitation are potentially important. It would mean that the economy doesn't necessarily operate efficiently (as a first approximation), and that unions don't necessarily cause inefficiencies. It would mean that there is a potentially much bigger role for government regulation. And the point is, when discussing a particular topic – international trade say – the texts don't say "if we assume perfect competition we get these predictions; if we assume imperfect competition we get these predictions; now let's compare the predictions to the facts". This is thought to be too complicated, too advanced. But this is a cop out, a dereliction of duty, and is inconsistent with the methodology which the textbooks purport to endorse.
So, while other models of market structure are taught, they are downplayed. On the other hand, no other paradigms are taught. The mainstream textbooks only contain information about the neo-classical paradigm. How do they get away with this?
Again, it's a question of keeping things simple. They argue they don't want to confuse the student. It's hard enough to teach neoclassical concepts without further confusing students with critiques of what they are learning. There's a nice video of Stephen Marglin addressing the Occupy Harvard movement where he discusses this. (Here's the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf0-E8X-GHo ). He tells how, in his "critical perspectives" introductory economics course, he begins by teaching the neoclassical theory. Then he introduces several critical perspectives. And he acknowledges that this is a huge undertaking. He acknowledges that it takes most students most of their time to get their heads around the neoclassical concepts. But he also acknowledges that in most economics departments there is never a good time for the critique. If it's too hard for first-year economics students, it's certainly too hard for high-school students. And then graduate students need to have a ton of maths packed into the curriculum, so there's no time there. So, as he says, "economists are all for critical thinking, just not today…tomorrow."
In fact in my own "critical perspectives" course I use our Anti-Textbook. I teach the mainstream material (that's the first part of each chapter). And the students teach the Anti-Text material (the second part of each chapter). They enjoy shooting me down! So far, it seems to work well. But I've been fortunate to have a small class.
Rod Hill: I'd just add that the dominance of the neo-classical paradigm (at least in the English-speaking world) means that there's less internal pressure within the profession to provide other viewpoints in a principles course than there might be in, say, sociology. Lecturers trained only in neo-classical economics are comfortable using textbooks that contain only that viewpoint.
Most students come to their undergraduate studies in economics with no knowledge of different approaches so they are not in a position to ask 'Hey, what would ecological economics have to say about that?' They rely on their instructors to tell them what economics is.
I remember as an undergraduate stumbling upon a copy of Galbraith's The New Industrial State in a used book shop, reading it and finding it interesting, and wondering 'Why have I not heard about this in my courses?' But I rarely asked such questions and had no access to the kind of guidance that we're trying to provide in The Economics Anti-Textbook.
toxymoron says: A french professor of economy has already published the same textbook (an anti-textbook of economics) back in 2003: http://www.amazon.fr/Antimanuel-d%C3%A9conomie-fourmis-Bernard-Maris/dp/2749500788, apparently covering the same ground.
craazyman says: I would propose Conrad's Heart of Darkness as an introductory economics textbook.
Kurtz could be your average management employee. The ivory trade could be the industry under examination. The nameless and faceless Brussels bureaucrats could be the head office executives. The workers are, well, you know, the folks in the bushes.
Marlow. Now he could be the "economics student". Espeically when he answers the Russian with the phrase "no method at all" (you'd have to read the book) ha haha. And the Russian, he could be the neoclassical theorist.
too much funny stuff at 6 am. How is this possible? Because I had half a bottle of red red wine last night and fell asleep at 8:30 so I'm ready to go.
Phil do you drink Guiness? What about those two econ dudes in the interview? Are they party animals just having fun yacking it up or are they ready to martyr themselves in some Occupation tied to a treed and getting pepper sprayed and batoned like saints from the Bible? I'm not sure I'm ready for the baton beating. I'm no saint but I'm not much of a sinner either. It's hard to change the world, one idea at a time. Especially when you sit around thinking about it like a math equation.
- LeonovaBalletRusse says:
craazyman: "Conrad's The Heart of Darkness" as elementary textbook.
Brilliant recommendation!
Replyjake chase says: The very best anti-economics book is Veblen's Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), It is 100 pages long in paperback and explains everything anyone needs to know about contemporary capitalism, except for the Federal Reserve System which did not exist. As for the Fed, its real mission is to foster usury by the major banks and protect these banks from the consequences of the folly known as growth. It is through the Fed balance sheet that CDS and shadow banking meltdowns have been thus far avoided at the expense of real economic activity, unemployment, and impoverishment of retired citizens. Another contemporary economic reality is the systematic looting of the corporate sector by executives enabled by stooge directors. Nothing can be done about any of this unless and until enough people wise up and fix our two party conspiracy referred to in media as American Democracy, but those hoping to protect themselves and any wealth they may be lucky enough to have or hereafter accumulate are advised to begin by understanding how the game really works.
Eric Patton says: Actually, Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert already did this in their 1991 Princeton University Press book Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics.
lambert strether says: If predictive power matters, why do any neo-classicists still have jobs?
Reply
- RueTheDay says:
That is the absolute beauty of the complementarity between the Chicago School and the Austrian School. The Friedmanites, with their F-Twist, get to say "assumptions don't matter, they don't have to be realistic, all that matters is predictive power". The Austrians, with their praxeology, get to say "economics is just a system of logic, it's too complex to be predictive, what matters is that your assumptions are axiomatic and cannot be refuted". Add the two together, and neither assumptions nor predictive power matter. Perfect.
William Neil says: Thanks very much for this. I have just happened to fire off an Email to the AFL-CIO asking why they don't teach "political economy," or at least, a history of economic ideas in their labor "colleges."
And at the same time I am reading the last and least known of John Kenneth Galbraiths "trilogy," "Economics and the Public Purpose," which came out in 1973, just before the American economic century fell apart. The book is rife with criticisms of neo-classical models and assumptions, many along exactly the same lines described in this interview. Especially important is the reality that the closer one looks at any given market, the more one realizes how far markets often diverge from the assumptions in textbooks.
Think about the power of Wal-Mart and the recent two part New York Times series on Apple and where and our "electronics" are made,which reminded us of Mike Daisey's penetrating bullet point: "There are no humane electronics." These two firms have enormous power over their entire now extremely elongated supply chain,with the ugliest and most brutal parts of it (the worst of the inhumane labor aspects) hidden from the sight of those delicate upper middle class American eyes, whose same ears are plugged with the latest in the hyper-innovative electronics. Talk about being customer driven, hyper-efficient (those constantly falling prices)…it would all seem to be model capitalism …until you realize how it actually runs and the costs and how imperfect and one-sided the information actually is in the hands of consumers.But all these wonderful (from the neoclassical assumptions) "efficiences" are creating the great downward pressures on American wages, elevating the firms and the entrepreneur to all the inside tracks in politics inside the Beltway, and are major contributors to the great international trade imbalances – which are not supposed to happen under neoclassical free trade assumptions, are they, and have been dimissed as unimportant for decades in economic academe.
Here's a challenge for all you sharp NC readers: take your classic market assumptions and work them forward in time along the history of American agriculture- farming, from Jefferson's day through the populist revolt to the elimination of farming (nearly) as a significant employer of people today. Is that a market success story? Externalities anyone (dead zones, soil loss, chemical pollution inside bodies and waterways)? How should employees look at this type of capitlaistic success story which involves the liquidation of the "occupation itself?" What if this is a broader trend, as clearly ua suggested by those famous Toyota robotized factories that Tom Friedman loved to visit before he had lunch with all those globalization salesmen?
Let me conclude with the fine thought that a "current" Apple executive left the NY Times readers – and we the public with in that long article "How the US Lost out on iPhone work," from Jan. 21, 2012: "We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries…we don't have an obligatin to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
That wouldn't be so horrible if we were still ignorant of the whole context of Apple's story,or if entrepreurs and globlizers weren't at the same time as pleading their case for efficiency weren't also dominating the political processes around the world, and also mightily influencing the intellectual ones inside the economics profession…but it is an ideology, and it's as one sided and as dangerous as laissez-faire once was in the late 19th century. The entrepreneur has, granted all that they have invented and marketed, come to eclipse all other social types inside the political process, and as a more than a few have pointed out, the logical conclusion is appearing now in the Greek-German-EU debates: let the market interpreters – the economic technocrats, and not elections, run the country; as if the elections were actually still offering a serious alternative….
Enrique says: Thanks for the interview.
The critics against the classical model are ok, but they miss in many points ( I did not read the book!)
1. Abstraction "not real" : Abstraction per se is not bad. Moreover, I find it , the model thinking , very useful when I need to simplify a complicated situation to its essence, especially in economics. The problem is that the models are not taught as such but as a normative, objectives "optimal" solutions in the social sense.
2. Lack of historical perspective. I think that the first year of Economic Degree should be dedicated to ONLY learn history and economic history. The models are a simplification of OUR world , OUR era … but in other times, under other technological and material circumstances the economic world behave differently… and will probably be different 100 years from now.
3. The closeness of the models : The classical equilibrium models can explain the Equilibrium point,,, fair enough. But they fail to incorporate the "external shocks " that actually make the whole equilibrium move to some other XY point… So if the model cannot explain the trigger of a dynamic economy , it becomes useless……
Last personal comment : I decided to go to study economics after reading ( in less than 8 hours ) Galbraiths book ( "The New Industrial State") . He showed me that economics is not just about money but something more deep
- William Neil says:
Enrique:
The point you made about economic history is a good one, and Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky has made a very similar one about how economists should be taught; he wants them to get a broad humanistic education and lots of economic history before they specialize.
But it's a dangerous thing,isn't it, to have students full of Braudel's wonderful three volume history of "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th to 18th Century," before they prostrate themselves under the assumptions of the simplified models?
And, by the way, Braudel references JK Galbraith's two tier model of capitalism a number of times,and agrees with it: a "market sector" of many small firms who can't plan and control their prices," and the "planning sector," dominated by the large ones who can.
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EconoSpeak
Sometimes living in the world of ideas makes it harder to understand the real one. If you happen to be an economist, and the time is now, that is true in spades. Take Paul Krugman, for instance. After bemoaning the terrible policy choices of the last two years, he writes, "I'm still trying to make sense of this global intellectual failure." It's as if the core problem is that political leaders didn't learn their macroeconomics well enough.
But Keynes was wrong about the power of "academic scribblers". Idea-smiths provide language, narratives and tools for those in control, but the broad contours of policy depend on who the controllers happen to be. We are not living through an epoch of intellectual failure, but one in which there is no available mechanism to oust a political-economic elite whose interests have become incompatible with ours.
This is not some sudden development, much less a coup d'etat as is sometimes claimed. No, the accretion of power by the rentiers has been systematic, structural and the outcome of a decades-long process. It is deeply rooted in modern capitalist economies due to the transformation of corporations into tradable, recombinant portfolios of assets, increasing concentration of and returns to ownership, and the failure of regulation to keep pace with technology and transnational scale. Those who sit at the pinnacle of wealth for the most part no longer think about production, nor do they worry very much about who the ultimate consumers will be; they take financial positions and demand policies that will see to it that these positions are profitable.
The rapid and robust global restoration of profits post-2008 was not an accident. Public funds were used to bail out exposed creditors and shore up asset values, while the crisis was used to suppress wages and postpone meaningful regulatory reform. Indeed, I can predict with some confidence that many of the profits, particularly in the financial sector, that have been reported in official filings and blessed by the accounting firms will later be found to be illusory-but not before those who have claims on the revenues have cashed in to their own personal advantage. The institutions will be decimated, but those who owned, lent to or bet on them will be rich. This is not a failure, at least not for them.
You could make a case that, collectively, the interests of the financially endowed ultimately require a rescue of the real, nonfinancial global economy. Surely, when we take our painful plunge into the second dip of the Great Recession, their wealth will be at risk. But the ability to see it at a system level presupposes either a system-level organization of the class or the existence of individual interests that are transparently systemic. Neither appears to be the case today. From what we (you and me) can see from our vantage point, the ruling demands are to make sure my bonds are serviced, my counterparties pony up, the markets I invest in stay liquid, and expenditures for public welfare (i.e. the losers and chiselers) are slashed.
The first principle of political economy is that the scope of democracy depends on the range of views and interests (typically tightly linked) of the owning and controlling class. Genuine public debate and decision-making extends only to those issues on which the elites are divided. In what country today is there a significant division among political-economic elites over core economic questions? How would our situation be different if Obama, Cameron, Merkel, Sarkozy et al. had been on the losing side of their elections?
So, the current mess is not the result of a failure by intellectuals-although clearer, less ideologically-driven thinking by economists would certainly be a good thing and might make a small dent at the margin. As long as there are even a few economists who proclaim the virtues of austerity and deregulation, however, their views will dominate. They haven't won a battle of ideas; they are simply the ones who have been handed the microphone.
The real problem is political, and it is profound. Unless we can unseat the class that sees the world only through its portfolios, they may well take us all the way down. Unfortunately, no one seems to have a clue how such a revolution can be engineered in a modern, complex, transnational economy.PQuincy
I'm a historian, and I think the past confirms your assessment of elite behavior and priorities, not only in the last 2 centuries of mass-based polities, but since the rise of large-scale states altogether. Political contention is almost always limited to a narrow range of issues on which those with power disagree, meaning that significant change (and there has been significant change in the political sphere, as well as the economic one) generally results from elite conflicts, not from 'popular' pressure. In fairness, elite contention does open gaps for genuinely 'progressive' change, and that's an important lever for intellectuals to remember...but as you say, academics, thinkers, et al. are as a rule never in a position to have more than a marginal effect.
It's not a promising situation now, structurally: a series of positive feedback loops in the political sphere are actually concentrating the influence of what I am forced to call a "reactionary clique", at a time when the policies pursued by that clique are, at least on a larger time-frame, seriously destabilizing. But the narcotic effects of power are such that those who drive the dynamics of elite conflict rarely see the larger picture -- behave, for all practical purposes. as though they were incapable of seeing the larger picture (call it, if you like, discursive hegemony), and those who believe they see a larger picture are structurally excluded from bringing about changes in response to their perception.
Awwww....we poor intellectuals ;-)
TheTrucker
A very good article from Peter Dorman. I have no disagreement and little to add. My "ideas" are just about worthless in the current climate. Even more worthless that those of well known and respected folk like Krugman, Delong, and Dean Baker and others.
I stand fittingly chastised for my indictment of the economists.
The Tea Party may well have hit upon a method to overcome the current problems. A constitutional convention to propose particular modifications to federal government structure might seem to be the way out. But that is a holdover from the time when people rode a horse to the nation's capital in order to be seated in the discussion chamber. The problem is best resolved buy an incorruptible on line polling system of direct democracy in which various policies are proposed and tested for consensus. I do not trust the pollsters and I do not feel that they ask the right questions. At present we have the "super committee" approach which goes in the wrong direction totally. This election of Dems or Pugs who then decide what is the best way to maintain their own power has got to go.
I know that the public is easy to fool. The Republicans prove it every day. Yet there is no acceptable substitute for self governance. When we look at the polls we find that taxing the rich is the majority opinion and that social welfare is a high priority. Yet there is no way to act upon this consensus because the rich own the government. That must change, and it cannot change from the top. Surely there must be a peaceful means of revolution.
If a policy and polling system can be created that is impervious to tampering and corruption then it is entirely possible to supplant the current system or to dramatically improve the current system's performance. I see no other way.
Thanks for the very well thought out reasoning in you post.
While you correctly identify the problem and its solution (current "ruling class" and its unseating), you are shy in suggesting how a solution might come about. While I do not advocate violence, history has shown us that fundamentally there are two ways by which subjugated classes improve their position. A traumatic way and less traumatic one.
Revolutions (most egregious examples are the French, Bolshevik, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions), whereby the ruling class, along with its interests, are eliminated by the subjugated classes. A traumatic event indeed, but, in my opinion, not sustainable in the long run unless the entire world adopts those political and economic paradigms.
Less traumatic and, more sustainable in the long term, are the outcomes of strong labor and student movements like the ones that took place in Europe in the 60s and 70s. Those movements made sure to convey to the ruling classes the message that a more equitable wealth distribution and effective social safety net were needed to avoid the extremes and dispossession that a revolution would involve. Reluctantly, the ruling class complied and the social safety nets and income distributions typical of Western Europe emerged.
In the same light, one must interpret the recent unrests in Western European countries (UK, Greece, France) (and most recently in Israel) as a response to the austerity measures taken by conservative governments of these countries to protect rentiers and capitalists. The austerity movement is trying to undo at least some (ideally, all) of the achievements of the 60s and 70s and redistribute wealth away from the "ruled classes", when it is clearly the "ruling class" that should bear most of the cost of its disastrous, reckless, and self-serving policies. While the current message in Western Europe is still not of the same intensity of the 60s and 70s due to a current better wealth distribution than that of the 60s, the message is similar in content and direction. Its intensity may increase if the rentiers and capitalists will insist with their policies.
So, why the US labor and student movements do not materialize or are active to the same extent of the ones in Europe? The answer is very simple… while in Europe the "ruled classes" realized a long time ago that there will never be cooperation between them and the "ruling class", in the US people still believe and pursue the American dream, which is fueled by the once in a while admission of few "mortals" on Mount Olympus. Let's also not forget that constant sense of guilt passed on by the Pilgrims that, somewhat, it is exclusively the individual's fault if his/her life is not better… and, maybe, the Pilgrims they were right given that US citizens keep electing the same (type of) people over and over to lead them. After all, wouldn't you rather have a beer with a nice guy from Texas or Hawaii than protesting in some square?
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Jun 04, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Gordon Wilson , 31 May 2017 at 09:39 PMColonel I have refrained from any posting anywhere for any reason for months, but since the discussion seems to turn to decryption so often I thought you might be interested in knowing about network management systems built into Intel and AMD based machines for years, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_TechnologyHardware-based management does not depend on the presence of an OS or locally installed management agent. Hardware-based management has been available on Intel/AMD based computers in the past, but it has largely been limited to auto-configuration using DHCP or BOOTP for dynamic IP address allocation and diskless workstations, as well as wake-on-LAN (WOL) for remotely powering on systems.[6] AMT is not intended to be used by itself; it is intended to be used with a software management application.[1] It gives a management application (and thus, the system administrator who uses it) access to the PC down the wire, in order to remotely do tasks that are difficult or sometimes impossible when working on a PC that does not have remote functionalities built into it.[1][3][7]I think our second O in OODA is getting fuzzed if we don't consider some of the observations found in "Powershift" by Toffler as well.
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Intel has confirmed a Remote Elevation of Privilege bug (CVE-2017-5689) in its Management Technology, on 1 May 2017.[12] Every Intel platform with either Intel Standard Manageability, Active Management Technology, or Small Business Technology, from Nehalem in 2008 to Kaby Lake in 2017 has a remotely exploitable security hole in the IME (Intel Management Engine) .[13][14]The point being is that many Intel and AMD based computers can and have been owned by various governments and groups for years, and at this level have access to any information on these machines before the encryption software is launched to encrypt any communications.
If this known software management tool is already on board, then extrapolation Toffler's chipping warning to unannounced or unauthorized by various actors, one begins to see where various nation states have gone back to typewriters for highly sensitive information, or are building their own chip foundries, and writing their own operating systems and TCP/IP protocols, and since these things are known knowns, one would not be too far fetched in assuming the nation state level players are communicating over something entirely different than you and I are using. How that impacts the current news cycle, and your interpretation of those events, I leave to your good judgment.
I would urge all of my fellow Americans, especially those with a megaphone, to also take care that we are not the subject of the idiom divide and conquer instead of its' master. To that end I think the concept of information overload induced by the internet may in fact be part of the increasing polarization and information bubbles we see forming with liberals and conservatives. This too fuzzes the second O in OODA and warps the D and thus the A, IMHO.
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