Chris Hedges interviewed by Bill Moyers

A new book by Chris Hedges and journalist/graphic artist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, prompted this interview of Hedges by Bill Moyers. (The video appears at the bottom of the page in the link.)

Hedges is remarkably articulate and is very good at giving a clear glimpse into the ugly, violent and destructive underbelly of the system. I'll have to find some way to get students to see parts of this.

RH

A Finnish translation of The Economics Anti-Textbook?!

Recently, a colleague from Finland wrote to us that he was trying to interest publishers in Finland in a translation of The Economics Anti-Textbook. To get someone interested in doing that, some information about the book's use in universities would be useful. The publishers provide us nothing along these lines and I have searched the web as best I can and found half a dozen (quite varied) courses that have used it in one way or another, but I'm sure there are many more I don't know about.

If you have used it yourself, as an instructor or a student, or if you know someone who has, we would very much appreciate getting a note with some details. (Our gmail.com address is on the main blog page.)

Chinese edition of The Economics Anti-Textbook

Such is the language barrier, that only now did we discover that the Chinese edition of The Economics Anti-Textbook has been in print for a year. The Chinese title is 你最应该知道的 主流经济学  教科书的荒谬  which Google Translate awkwardly renders as 'You should be aware... of the absurdity of mainstream economics textbooks'. The cover (below, lifted from Amazon.cn) has a picture of a book whose interior appears to have been mostly shredded, which is not bad.

I'm curious to find out whether everything has been translated or whether any passages have been omitted in the interests of political correctness. As far as I could tell, the translation rights were sold with no restrictions concerning censorship.

RH

The art of economics

A series of essays (called Uneconomics) is appearing on the website Open Democracy. I found Judith Marquand's piece, "Economics as a public art" interesting. Although she doesn't mention it, John Maynard Keynes' father, John Neville Keynes (an economist at Cambridge) wrote a book in 1891 on the methodology of economics in which he argued that economics could also be considered an art, "having for its object the determination of practical rules of action".

But to arrive at 'practical rules of action' to deal with some of the major problems facing the world (which Marquand writes about), economists have to have a much wider vision than the narrow one reflected in standard maximizing models. The best economists have always thought like that, but it takes a wide range of skills to do so and that is not the training young economists are getting. As usual, JM Keynes best described the necessary skills in a famous passage from his obituary of Alfred Marshall:

the  master-economist  must  possess  a  rare  combination  of  gifts.  He  must  reach  a  high  standard  in  several different  directions  and  must  combine  talents  not  often  found together.  He  must  be  mathematician,  historian,  statesman, philosopher-in  some  degree.  He  must  understand  symbols and  speak  in  words.  He  must  contemplate  the  particular  in terms  of the  general,  and touch  abstract  and concrete  in the same flight  of  thought.  He  must  study  the  present  in  the  light  of the  past  for the  purposes  of the  future.  No  part  of man's  nature or his  institutions  must  lie  entirely  outside  his  regard.  He  must be  purposeful  and  disinterested  in  a  simultaneous  mood;  as aloof  and incorruptible  as an artist,  yet sometimes  as near the earth as  a  politician. (p.322)

The part of Marquand's essay that is most relevant to the subject of this blog (and our Anti-Textbook) comes near the end where she writes:

The teaching of economics needs to be changed from top to bottom. Students need to have a grounding in economic history, set in its social and political context. They need to learn some social psychology, drawing on insights from neuro-science and anthropology. They need training in social science research methods focussing heavily on areas which are often neglected in the training of economists – all the ethnographic methods. They need to think critically about selecting indicators; about the design of questionnaires; about the crucial importance of the assumptions when building models. They need to study the operation of current economic organisation set in its political context. And they need some understanding of the rich heritage of economic thought.

 RH

 

An example to us all

A comment yesterday below the second half of our interview with Naked Capitalism stood out for me. It was written by Gabe Langton about Professor Douglas Orr of City College of San Francisco and I hope no one will mind if it quote it in full.

I entered San Francisco City College just before the birth of my son in fall 2008, and was fortunate enough to take a microeconomics class taught by Douglas Orr, who spent the first two class sessions warning students to critically challenge the models that we’d be learning. He gave an analogy:  

“If you want to learn about an airplane, the cheapest way to do it is with a model airplane. Maybe you go out and get a build-n-paint F-16 from your local hobby shop. It’s a great way to get details about the appearance and dimensions of a real jet fighter. Or maybe you go out and get a little balsa-wood glider, which is a great way to get an intuition for basic aerodynamics. But every kid understands implicitly that F-16s are not built by snapping plastic chunks out of molded frames and gluing them together, just as every kid understands that you don’t go to the airport and get strapped onto a giant balsa wood trojan glidar and hurl [yourself] off a bridge. 

"As you learn about mainstream economics you will be continuously urged by your textbook to apply the models you are learning to the real world, and you will be faced with constant reminders of the predictive power of these models. But the reason I’m standing here talking to you is to remind you, just as constantly, that every single morning, in offices from Wall Street to the IMF, economists are strapping entire populations to wooden planes and launching them off bridges, throwing up their hands in helpless befuddlement at the inevitable grisly results, cashing their checks, and heading out for the golf course by 2pm.” 

I often visited him during office hours to turn in late work due to my son getting sick, or my hours at work overlapping with class time, and as far as I could tell he put in almost every second of his free time writing, consolidating, and refining instructional problems and examples in order to provide alternatives and context to the misleading shit in the text. It appeared to take monumental effort to do this while keeping it digestible enough that us community-college simpletons could still internalize the core concepts of economics. That he did it, year in and year out, and is still pulling it off, is amazing. Hopefully these texts and others like them will enable more of those economics professors like him, who are genuinely concerned with cultivating genuinely critical economic reasoning in future economists, to effectively revitalize the discipline.

Professor Douglas V. Orr, City College of San Francisco

Professor Orr's cautionary story about the dangers of taking a model too literally is a brilliant way to start a course. I envy his students!

RH