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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @07:26PM
The people who understand real economics are just not pretending to teach it like the snake-oil salesmen in universities.
They're the ones who own the world.
Economics is a social science concerned with the factors that determine the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Guess who knows those factors (and more) and has been controlling at least some of them?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday February 13 2017, @01:41AM
I'm afraid that's not correct, either. The ones who own the world don't understand real economics. They understand cheating. They are insanely wealthy because they rig every game so they win. It would be more accurate to call them a mafia than masters of economics.
The people who study economics as scientists, as professionals, are constantly exasperated by the first group. They don't complain too loudly outside the circle of their colleagues, however, because they make a fine living at giving intellectual and political cover to the machinations of the mafiosi. It's a familiar pattern from other disciplines, where the wealthiest of the food scientists run studies funded by the Coca-Colas of the world, and so on.
Washington DC delenda est.