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posted by janrinok on Sunday February 12 2017, @05:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the sir-can-do-better dept.

It is often opined here on Soylent that Economics isn't real science. You would expect economists to disagree with that sentiment, but it turns out that there is a growing international movement within the world of economics itself, started by a group of students, that seeks to drastically overhaul the entire field. Some choice quotes from the article, which is in fact a review of a book "which formalises and expands the case" that economics is in need of reform:

In the autumn of 2011, as the world's financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames. The students' first term would last longer than the Greek government. Banks across the west were still on life support. And David Cameron was imposing on Britons year on year of swingeing spending cuts.

Yet the bushfires those teenagers saw raging each night on the news got barely a mention in the seminars they sat through, they say: the biggest economic catastrophe of our times "wasn't mentioned in our lectures and what we were learning didn't seem to have any relevance to understanding it", they write in The Econocracy. "We were memorising and regurgitating abstract economic models for multiple-choice exams."

Part of this book describes what happened next: how the economic crisis turned into a crisis of economics. It deserves a good account, since the activities of these Manchester students rank among the most startling protest movements of the decade.

After a year of being force-fed irrelevancies, say the students, they formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, with a sympathetic lecturer giving them evening classes on the events and perspectives they weren't being taught. They lobbied teachers for new modules, and when that didn't work, they mobilised hundreds of undergraduates to express their disappointment in the influential National Student Survey. The economics department ended up with the lowest score of any at the university: the professors had been told by their pupils that they could do better.


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:31PM (#466240)

    Austrian economics... What a libertarian swamp! Con artists, the lot of you. Or just morons... A system of contracts!!! Lololol jmorris stay off drugs eh? Or, if you are a teetoler like you sound then get ON some drugs. Alabama institute of crazy, calling themselves austrian economics with a story about "the European perspective". Toooooollls

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:45PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:45PM (#466249)

    Like I said, don't assume Mises is Ayn Rand or Laup Nor. Go and actually read his book. He doesn't assume everyone is Homo Economicus. He doesn't propose a world where governments don't exist either. The title is intended as a spoiler; he assumes economics isn't math, it should instead begin as a study of how humans actually interact in the real world.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @11:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @11:23PM (#466343)

      Yes I read that disclaimer, but given the penchant of the messenger for outlandish crazy talk, and the website looking like a sophisticated con job for a university, I won't bring myself to read something that has a high probability of matching those first two impressions. Besides, you should link directly to the paper if you really want people to check it out.

      • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday February 13 2017, @07:43AM

        by jmorris (4844) on Monday February 13 2017, @07:43AM (#466505)

        I'm really not sure where to start. If you expect to participate in a discussion of economics it really isn't asking a lot to expect you to at least know the basics. And you just failed.

        The nonsense at Wikipedia not withstanding, there are four major threads of Western economic thought with non-trivial numbers of current followers. Marx's Capital is the foundational work in the Marxist school. It might have killed over a hundred million people but it still dominates the universities of the West. If you attend a university the odds of exposure to Marxist economic thought is basically 100%. John Maynard Keynes and his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is the foundation of the Keynesian school, If you take an actual economics course you will learn about it because it is the dominant theory running the world's faltering economy at the moment. Milton Friedman is the "Founding Father" of the Chicago school. Reagan and Reaganonics were heavily influenced by this school but it is currently less influential. And finally Ludwig Von Mises and his Human Action is at the heart of the Austrian school. The .com startup world types that built the Internet like it, Ron Paul swears by it, very little influence in the real world. Within each are of course multiple subdivisions, some different enough to qualify as "heresies".

        Listed in most insane to least order by my opinion, yours may differ but until you bother to at least know they exist there isn't much hope of you knowing enough about how they differ to have an opinion worth sharing.

        I didn't bother to post a link because anyone here should have sufficient Internet savvy to navigate a website put together by Internet savvy Libertarians. Seriously. You know the location of a website with free ebooks and you have an author and title, what more do you need? Click "Library" for various formats of free e-book or "Store" to buy a dead tree edition. Heck, if you incant "Mises Human Action ebook" into a Google search box the first link is the right one and the second one is to the dead tree edition. As I said, not an obscure author or work.

      • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday February 13 2017, @02:17PM

        by LoRdTAW (3755) on Monday February 13 2017, @02:17PM (#466586) Journal

        The guy can be a shit head. Fine. But to dismiss everything he says based on a few outlandish posts is unfair to say the least.