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主流经济学正面临着激进的改革运动，主流经济学正在逐渐失去其支撑，国外经济学专业越来越冷门，没什么人读。
北美经济学博士很难找到工作。
敚攑ost-autistic economics network经济学后向改革运动网
http://www.paecon.net/
后向经济学改革运动评论
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/
A Brief History of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement
经济学后向改革运动简史
Theories, scientific and otherwise, do not represent the world as it is but rather by highlighting certain aspects of it while leaving others in the dark. It may be the case that two theories highlight the same aspects of some corner of reality but offer different conclusions. In the last century, this type of situation preoccupied the philosophy of science. Post-Autistic Economics, however, addresses a different kind of situation: one where one theory, that illuminates a few facets of its domain rather well, wants to suppress other theories that would illuminate some of the many facets that it leaves in the dark. This theory is neoclassical economics. Because it has been so successful at sidelining other approaches, it also is called “mainstream economics”.
From the 1960s onward, neoclassical economists have increasingly managed to block the employment of non-neoclassical economists in university economics departments and to deny them opportunities to publish in professional journals. They also have narrowed the economics curriculum that universities offer students. At the same time they have increasingly formalized their theory, making it progressively irrelevant to understanding economic reality. And now they are even banishing economic history and the history of economic thought from the curriculum, these being places where the student might be exposed to non-neoclassical ideas. Why has this tragedy happened?
Many factors have contributed, but three especially. First, neoclassical economists have as a group deluded themselves into believing that all you need for an exact science is mathematics, and never mind about whether the symbols used refer quantitatively to the real world. What began as an indulgence became an addiction, leading to a collective fantasy of scientific achievement where in most cases none exists. To preserve their illusions, neoclassical economists have found it increasingly necessary to isolate themselves from non-believers.
Second, as Joseph Stiglitz has observed, economics has suffered “a triumph of ideology over science”.1 Instead of regarding their theory as a tool in the pursuit of knowledge, neoclassical economists have made it the required viewpoint from which, at all times and in all places, to look at all economic phenomena. This is the position of neoliberalism.
Third, today’s economies, including the societies in which they are embedded, are very different from those of the 19th century for which neoclassical economics was invented to describe. These differences become more pronounced every decade as new aspects of economic reality emerge, for example, consumer societies, corporate globalization, economic induced environmental disasters and impending ecological ones, the accelerating gap between the rich and poor, and the movement for equal-opportunity economies. Consequently neoclassical economics sheds light on an ever-smaller proportion of economic reality, leaving more and more of it in the dark for students permitted only the neoclassical viewpoint. This makes the neoclassical monopoly more outrageous and costly every year, requiring of it ever more desperate measures of defense, like eliminating economic history and history of economics from the curriculum.
But eventually reality overtakes time-warp worlds like mainstream economics and the Soviet Union. The moment and place of the tipping point, however, nearly always takes people by surprise. In June 2000, a few economics students in Paris circulated a petition calling for the reform of their economics curriculum. One doubts that any of those students in their wildest dreams anticipated the effect their initiative would have. Their petition was short, modest and restrained. Its first part, “We wish to escape from imaginary worlds”, summarizes what they were protesting against.
Most of us have chosen to study economics so as to acquire a deep understanding of the economic phenomena with which the citizens of today are confronted. But the teaching that is offered, that is to say for the most part neoclassical theory or approaches derived from it, does not generally answer this expectation. Indeed, even when the theory legitimately detaches itself from contingencies in the first instance, it rarely carries out the necessary return to the facts. The empirical side (historical facts, functioning of institutions, study of the behaviors and strategies of the agents . . .) is almost nonexistent. Furthermore, this gap in the teaching, this disregard for concrete realities, poses an enormous problem for those who would like to render themselves useful to economic and social actors.
The students asked instead for a broad spectrum of analytical viewpoints.
Too often the lectures leave no place for reflection. Out of all the approaches to economic questions that exist, generally only one is presented to us. This approach is supposed to explain everything by means of a purely axiomatic process, as if this were THE economic truth. We do not accept this dogmatism. We want a pluralism of approaches, adapted to the complexity of the objects and to the uncertainty surrounding most of the big questions in economics (unemployment, inequalities, the place of financial markets, the advantages and disadvantages of free-trade, globalization, economic development, etc.)
The Parisian students’ complaint about the narrowness of their economics education and their desire for a broadband approach to economics teaching that would enable them to connect constructively and comprehensively with the complex economic realities of their time hit a chord with French news media. Major newspapers and magazines gave extensive coverage to the students’ struggle against the “autistic science”. Economics students from all over France rushed to sign the petition. Meanwhile a growing number of French economists dared to speak out in support and even to launch a parallel petition of their own. Finally the French government stepped in. The Minister of Education set up a high level commission to investigate the students’ complaints.
News of these events in France spread quickly via the Web and email around the world. The distinction drawn by the French students between what can be called narrowband and broadband approaches to economics, and their plea for the latter, found support from large numbers of economics students and economists in many countries. In June 2001, almost exactly a year after the French students had released their petition, 27 PhD candidates at Cambridge University in the UK launched their own, titled “Opening Up Economics”. Besides reiterating the French students’ call for a broadband approach to economics teaching, the Cambridge students also champion its application to economic research.
This debate is important because in our view the status quo is harmful in at least four respects. Firstly, it is harmful to students who are taught the 'tools' of mainstream economics without learning their domain of applicability. The source and evolution of these ideas is ignored, as is the existence and status of competing theories. Secondly, it disadvantages a society that ought to be benefiting from what economists can tell us about the world. Economics is a social science with enormous potential for making a difference through its impact on policy debates. In its present form its effectiveness in this arena is limited by the uncritical application of mainstream methods. Thirdly, progress towards a deeper understanding of many important aspects of economic life is being held back. By restricting research done in economics to that based on one approach only, the development of competing research programs is seriously hampered or prevented altogether. Fourth and finally, in the current situation an economist who does not do economics in the prescribed way finds it very difficult to get recognition for her research.
In August of the same year economics students from 17 countries who had gathered in the USA in Kansas City, released their International Open Letter to all economics departments calling on them to reform economics education and research by adopting the broadband approach. Their letter includes the following seven points.
1. A broader conception of human behavior. The definition of economic man as an autonomous rational optimizer is too narrow and does not allow for the roles of other determinants such as instinct, habit formation and gender, class and other social factors in shaping the economic psychology of social agents.
2. Recognition of culture. Economic activities, like all social phenomena, are necessarily embedded in culture, which includes all kinds of social, political and moral value-systems and institutions. These profoundly shape and guide human behavior by imposing obligations, enabling and disabling particular choices, and creating social or communal identities, all of which may impact on economic behavior.
3. Consideration of history. Economic reality is dynamic rather than static – and as economists we must investigate how and why things change over time and space. Realistic economic inquiry should focus on process rather than simply on ends.
4. A new theory of knowledge. The positive-vs.-normative dichotomy which has traditionally been used in the social sciences is problematic. The fact-value distinction can be transcended by the recognition that the investigator’s values are inescapably involved in scientific inquiry and in making scientific statements, whether consciously or not. This acknowledgement enables a more sophisticated assessment of knowledge claims.
5. Empirical grounding. More effort must be made to substantiate theoretical claims with empirical evidence. The tendency to privilege theoretical tenets in the teaching of economics without reference to empirical observation cultivates doubt about the realism
of such explanations.
6. Expanded methods. Procedures such as participant observation, case studies and discourse analysis should be recognized as legitimate means of acquiring and analyzing data alongside econometrics and formal modelling. Observation of phenomena from different vantage points using various data-gathering techniques may offer new insights into phenomena and enhance our understanding of them.
7. Interdisciplinary dialogue. Economists should be aware of diverse schools of thought within economics, and should be aware of developments in other disciplines, particularly the social sciences.
In March 2003 economics students at Harvard launched their own petition, demanding from its economics department an introductory course that would have “better balance and coverage of a broader spectrum of views” and that would “not only teach students the accepted modes of thinking, but also challenge students to think critically and deeply about conventional truths.”2
Students have not been alone in mounting increasing pressure on the status quo. Thousands of economists from scores of countries have also in various forms taken up the cause for broadband economics under the banner “Post-Autistic Economics” and the slogan “sanity, humanity and science” The PAE movement is not about trying to replace neoclassical economics with another partial truth, but rather about reopening economics for free scientific inquiry, making it a pursuit where empiricism outranks a priorism and where critical thinking rules instead of ideology.
Policy Implications of Post-Autistic Economics
经济学后向改革的政策含义
The neoclassical monopoly in the classroom and its prohibition on critical thinking means that it brainwashes successive generations of students into viewing economic reality exclusively through its concepts, which more often than not misrepresent or veil the world, especially today’s world. Nearly all of these neoclassical notions have a bearing on judgements about social, cultural and economic policy. Consequently, if society were to learn to think about economic matters outside the neoclassical conceptual system, it would almost certainly choose different policies. One of Post-Autistic Economics’ (PAE) projects has been to expose some of the many conceptual lunacies of today’s mainstream, both in terms of the concepts it uses and the concepts it lacks. Drawing on recent essays by PAE economists in A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics, especially the chapters by Michael A. Bernstein, Geoffrey Hodgson, Peter Söderbaum, Hugh Stretton, Richard Wolff, Robert Costanza, Herman E. Daly, Jean Gadrey and Edward Fullbrook,* this brief article briefly considers ten such concepts.
Neoclassical economics regards competition as a state rather than as a process. It defines perfect competition as a market with a large number of firms with identical products, costs structures, production techniques and market information. But in real life competition is a process by which firms continually seek to re-establish the conditions of their own profitability. To compete in a market requires firms to seek out and exploit differences between them in production, technology, distribution, access to information and awareness of trends in consumption. These differences are the essential dimensions in which competition takes place. Once the neoclassical conception of competition becomes imbedded in the student’s mind, appreciation of real-world competition, and hence the policies that might enhance it, becomes logically impossible.
Neoclassical economists love to talk about freedom of choice. But this is pure rhetoric, because they define rationality in a way that eliminates free choice from their conceptual space. By rationality they mean that an agent’s choices are in conformity with an ordering or scale of preferences. The “rational” agent chooses among the alternatives available that one which is highest on his ranking. Rational behaviour simply means behaviour in accordance with some ordering of alternatives in terms of relative desirability. In order for this approach to have any predictive power, it must be assumed that the preferences do not change over some period of time. So the basic condition of neoclassical rationality is that individuals must forego choice in favour of some past reckoning, thereafter acting as automata. This conceptual elimination of freedom of choice, in both its everyday and philosophical meanings, gives neoclassical theory the hypothetical determinacy that its Newtonian inspired metaphysics require. No indeterminacy; no choice. No determinacy; no neoclassical model. This is far from just an academic matter, because society needs an economics that is able to address questions regarding freedom of choice.
No terms in neoclassical economics are more sacrosanct than rational choice and rationality. Everyone identities with these words, because everyone wants to think of themselves as rational. But few people realize that economists give these words an ultra eccentric meaning. Neoclassical economics begins with an a priori conception of markets and economies as determinate systems that by the action of individual agents alone tend toward an efficient and market-clearing equilibrium. This requires that the individual agents, like the bodies in Newton’s system, behave in a prescribed manner. Neoclassicalists have deduced the particular pattern of behaviour that would make their imagined world logically possible, then named it “rational choice” or “rationality” and then declared that that is the way real people behave. But thankfully they don’t. Everyday economic actors do many things that by the neoclassical meaning of “rational” are “irrational”. Looking to the choices of other consumers as guides to what one might buy; buying a stock because you believe other people will be buying it and so increase its value, spending your money in a spirit of spontaneity rather than stopping to calculate the consequences and alternatives up to the limits of your cognitive powers; a taste for change, that is, buying something because you did not previously prefer it; these common consumer behaviours are all prohibited under the neoclassical notions of rational choice and rationality and so outside its scope of analysis.
These failings connect with another. Neoclassical economics is by its own axioms incapable of offering a coherent conceptualisation of the individual or economic agent. From where do the preferences that supposedly dictate the individual’s choice come from? Not from interpersonal relations, because if individual demands were interdependent, they would not be additive and thus the market demand function – neoclassicalism’s key analytical tool – would be undefined. And not from society, because neoclassicalism’s Newtonian atomism translates as methodological individualism, meaning that society is to be explained in terms of individuals and never the other way around.
This leaves an awful lot in the dark. In the main, despite the neoclassical axioms, we all categorise and classify according to prevailing cultural norms. Likewise our tastes and preferences for this and that reflect the social conventions and institutions with which we interact. Consequently individual choice is unavoidably and inextricably bound up with historically and geographically given social worlds. An economics that has nothing to say about the formation of economic tastes and preferences is silly and irresponsible, especially in an age of consumer societies and in a world now threatened with climate-change or worse.
For half a century neoclassical economics has hid its ideology behind the notion that it calls positive economics. This is the idea that it contains no value judgements because it mentions none. Of course such a notion belongs to an intellectually more naive age than today, but nonetheless it persists as an effective tool of indoctrination of undergraduates. The fact that neoclassical economics requires a highly restricted focus in order to maintain its atomist and determinist metaphysics compels it to make many extreme judgements about what is and is not economically important. There is not space even to list them. But an example is its notion of “economic man”, which is acutely ideological, as it emphasizes some roles and relationships and excludes others. By allowing only decisions based on utility maximization, it excludes other forms of ethics. As an economic agent, each individual acts in many roles, not just market ones, and is guided by his or her “ideological orientation”. That orientation may be founded on utilitarianism or not. It may for example be based on social and environmental ethics. PAE economists do not believe that economists have the right to select one ethics as the “correct” one for framing economic analysis. Furthermore the neoclassical insistence upon the utilitarian ideology legitimises a kind of “market ideology” and “consumerism” that increasingly appears dangerous to society and sidelines the debate about Sustainable Development.
Like rationality, nearly everyone thinks efficiency is a good idea. Neoclassical economists adore using this word, especially when addressing the public. But the meaning of “efficiency” always depends on what you choose to count. For example, suppose five firms all manage to lower by the same amounts the production cost and selling price of a standard product that they all produce. One does it by cutting its workers’ pay, another by working them longer hours, another by getting materials at lower prices from a poorer country, another by replacing some of its workers with robots, and another by inventing machinery improvements that allow it to cut work hours with no loss of output, profit, jobs or pay. Are all of these changes equally efficient (or inefficient)? A neoclassical economist will answer yes, because the five firms all end up producing the same product at the same cost and selling it at the same price. For them that is all that matters.
The prevailing mainstream also holds that in the realm of public affairs its concept of “efficiency” can and should determine the net balance between the positives (total benefits) and negatives (total costs) that would result from an economic policy or act. In place of public debate economists would substitute “cost-benefit analysis”. But any such analysis depends on the consequences selected and the kinds of “measurements” made. No efficiency claim is ever based on an identification of all the consequences, and quantitative quesstimates of the future inevitably have a crystal-ball dimension. In the final analysis, “efficient”, like “beautiful” is little more than a way of expressing a positive opinion.
Mainstream economics, and in consequence most policy dialogue, conflates two very different meanings of economic growth that are in common usage and with GNP mistakenly taken to be a measure of both. There is quantitative growth meaning an increase in the quantity of production and consumption, and there is qualitative growth meaning an improvement in well-being. For example, an epidemic may lead to growth of medical expenditure and hence increase GNP but not well-being. Pollution and congestion lead to huge expenditures to escape them (e.g., commuting from the suburbs, double glazing, air filters, security measures), the creation of new industries and an ever larger GNP but they also decrease well-being. Quantitative growth that causes negative qualitative growth is also called uneconomic growth. It is both a reality and a concept with which policy makers must come to terms, the sooner the better.
Closely related to these new anti-neoclassical concepts is another one, sustainable development. This refers to the physical scale of the economy relative to the ecosystem. Ecological economists view the economy as an open subsystem of the larger ecosystem which is finite, non-growing and, except for solar energy, materially closed. This point of view compels asking questions regarding scale. How large is the economic subsystem relative to the earth’s ecosystem? What is its maximum possible size? What is its most desirable size in terms of human welfare? These questions, around which policy decisions will and must increasingly be made, are not found in standard economics textbooks. Neoclassical economics can not accommodate the concept of sustainable development because if adopted as a goal it requires that goods be valued in part by their contribution to that goal and not solely on their contribution to individual utility maximisation.
The close to monopoly position of neoclassical economics is incompatible with normal ideas of democracy. Economics has some of the qualities of a science, but because of the very nature of its subject matter it is forever and fundamentally ideological. It is best not to deceive oneself and others about that. Economics’ preoccupation with values and worldly acts means that in a democratic society it has a moral responsibility to promote the exploration of economic knowledge from more than one point of view so as to make possible the informed and intelligent debate and discussion that democracy requires. But the hegemony of neoclassical economics means that departments of economics have become political propaganda centres. In 2002, Joseph Stiglitz, a recent winner of the so-called Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote in The Guardian that economics as taught “in America's graduate schools . . . bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science.” Is this a legitimate use of public funds? What is certain is that it is a dangerous state of affairs, but one that is now being challenged. The PAE movement immodestly seeks over the next ten years a revolution: the transformation of economics into a genuinely pluralistic enterprise wishing to contribute to, rather than subvert, democratic processes. The movement’s success depends in part on other disciplines and professions withdrawing their patronage from the neoclassical hegemony in favour of the now thousands of economists working for the new order.
Note
* A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics, edited by Edward Fullbrook, Anthem Press 2004
主流经济学正面临着激进的改革运动，主流经济学正在逐渐失去其支撑，国外经济学专业越来越冷门，没什么人读。
北美经济学博士很难找到工作。
敚攑ost-autistic economics network经济学后向改革运动网
http://www.paecon.net/
后向经济学改革运动评论
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/
A Brief History of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement
经济学后向改革运动简史
Theories, scientific and otherwise, do not represent the world as it is but rather by highlighting certain aspects of it while leaving others in the dark. It may be the case that two theories highlight the same aspects of some corner of reality but offer different conclusions. In the last century, this type of situation preoccupied the philosophy of science. Post-Autistic Economics, however, addresses a different kind of situation: one where one theory, that illuminates a few facets of its domain rather well, wants to suppress other theories that would illuminate some of the many facets that it leaves in the dark. This theory is neoclassical economics. Because it has been so successful at sidelining other approaches, it also is called “mainstream economics”.
From the 1960s onward, neoclassical economists have increasingly managed to block the employment of non-neoclassical economists in university economics departments and to deny them opportunities to publish in professional journals. They also have narrowed the economics curriculum that universities offer students. At the same time they have increasingly formalized their theory, making it progressively irrelevant to understanding economic reality. And now they are even banishing economic history and the history of economic thought from the curriculum, these being places where the student might be exposed to non-neoclassical ideas. Why has this tragedy happened?
Many factors have contributed, but three especially. First, neoclassical economists have as a group deluded themselves into believing that all you need for an exact science is mathematics, and never mind about whether the symbols used refer quantitatively to the real world. What began as an indulgence became an addiction, leading to a collective fantasy of scientific achievement where in most cases none exists. To preserve their illusions, neoclassical economists have found it increasingly necessary to isolate themselves from non-believers.
Second, as Joseph Stiglitz has observed, economics has suffered “a triumph of ideology over science”.1 Instead of regarding their theory as a tool in the pursuit of knowledge, neoclassical economists have made it the required viewpoint from which, at all times and in all places, to look at all economic phenomena. This is the position of neoliberalism.
Third, today’s economies, including the societies in which they are embedded, are very different from those of the 19th century for which neoclassical economics was invented to describe. These differences become more pronounced every decade as new aspects of economic reality emerge, for example, consumer societies, corporate globalization, economic induced environmental disasters and impending ecological ones, the accelerating gap between the rich and poor, and the movement for equal-opportunity economies. Consequently neoclassical economics sheds light on an ever-smaller proportion of economic reality, leaving more and more of it in the dark for students permitted only the neoclassical viewpoint. This makes the neoclassical monopoly more outrageous and costly every year, requiring of it ever more desperate measures of defense, like eliminating economic history and history of economics from the curriculum.
But eventually reality overtakes time-warp worlds like mainstream economics and the Soviet Union. The moment and place of the tipping point, however, nearly always takes people by surprise. In June 2000, a few economics students in Paris circulated a petition calling for the reform of their economics curriculum. One doubts that any of those students in their wildest dreams anticipated the effect their initiative would have. Their petition was short, modest and restrained. Its first part, “We wish to escape from imaginary worlds”, summarizes what they were protesting against.
Most of us have chosen to study economics so as to acquire a deep understanding of the economic phenomena with which the citizens of today are confronted. But the teaching that is offered, that is to say for the most part neoclassical theory or approaches derived from it, does not generally answer this expectation. Indeed, even when the theory legitimately detaches itself from contingencies in the first instance, it rarely carries out the necessary return to the facts. The empirical side (historical facts, functioning of institutions, study of the behaviors and strategies of the agents . . .) is almost nonexistent. Furthermore, this gap in the teaching, this disregard for concrete realities, poses an enormous problem for those who would like to render themselves useful to economic and social actors.
The students asked instead for a broad spectrum of analytical viewpoints.
Too often the lectures leave no place for reflection. Out of all the approaches to economic questions that exist, generally only one is presented to us. This approach is supposed to explain everything by means of a purely axiomatic process, as if this were THE economic truth. We do not accept this dogmatism. We want a pluralism of approaches, adapted to the complexity of the objects and to the uncertainty surrounding most of the big questions in economics (unemployment, inequalities, the place of financial markets, the advantages and disadvantages of free-trade, globalization, economic development, etc.)
The Parisian students’ complaint about the narrowness of their economics education and their desire for a broadband approach to economics teaching that would enable them to connect constructively and comprehensively with the complex economic realities of their time hit a chord with French news media. Major newspapers and magazines gave extensive coverage to the students’ struggle against the “autistic science”. Economics students from all over France rushed to sign the petition. Meanwhile a growing number of French economists dared to speak out in support and even to launch a parallel petition of their own. Finally the French government stepped in. The Minister of Education set up a high level commission to investigate the students’ complaints.
News of these events in France spread quickly via the Web and email around the world. The distinction drawn by the French students between what can be called narrowband and broadband approaches to economics, and their plea for the latter, found support from large numbers of economics students and economists in many countries. In June 2001, almost exactly a year after the French students had released their petition, 27 PhD candidates at Cambridge University in the UK launched their own, titled “Opening Up Economics”. Besides reiterating the French students’ call for a broadband approach to economics teaching, the Cambridge students also champion its application to economic research.
This debate is important because in our view the status quo is harmful in at least four respects. Firstly, it is harmful to students who are taught the 'tools' of mainstream economics without learning their domain of applicability. The source and evolution of these ideas is ignored, as is the existence and status of competing theories. Secondly, it disadvantages a society that ought to be benefiting from what economists can tell us about the world. Economics is a social science with enormous potential for making a difference through its impact on policy debates. In its present form its effectiveness in this arena is limited by the uncritical application of mainstream methods. Thirdly, progress towards a deeper understanding of many important aspects of economic life is being held back. By restricting research done in economics to that based on one approach only, the development of competing research programs is seriously hampered or prevented altogether. Fourth and finally, in the current situation an economist who does not do economics in the prescribed way finds it very difficult to get recognition for her research.
In August of the same year economics students from 17 countries who had gathered in the USA in Kansas City, released their International Open Letter to all economics departments calling on them to reform economics education and research by adopting the broadband approach. Their letter includes the following seven points.
1. A broader conception of human behavior. The definition of economic man as an autonomous rational optimizer is too narrow and does not allow for the roles of other determinants such as instinct, habit formation and gender, class and other social factors in shaping the economic psychology of social agents.
2. Recognition of culture. Economic activities, like all social phenomena, are necessarily embedded in culture, which includes all kinds of social, political and moral value-systems and institutions. These profoundly shape and guide human behavior by imposing obligations, enabling and disabling particular choices, and creating social or communal identities, all of which may impact on economic behavior.
3. Consideration of history. Economic reality is dynamic rather than static – and as economists we must investigate how and why things change over time and space. Realistic economic inquiry should focus on process rather than simply on ends.
4. A new theory of knowledge. The positive-vs.-normative dichotomy which has traditionally been used in the social sciences is problematic. The fact-value distinction can be transcended by the recognition that the investigator’s values are inescapably involved in scientific inquiry and in making scientific statements, whether consciously or not. This acknowledgement enables a more sophisticated assessment of knowledge claims.
5. Empirical grounding. More effort must be made to substantiate theoretical claims with empirical evidence. The tendency to privilege theoretical tenets in the teaching of economics without reference to empirical observation cultivates doubt about the realism
of such explanations.
6. Expanded methods. Procedures such as participant observation, case studies and discourse analysis should be recognized as legitimate means of acquiring and analyzing data alongside econometrics and formal modelling. Observation of phenomena from different vantage points using various data-gathering techniques may offer new insights into phenomena and enhance our understanding of them.
7. Interdisciplinary dialogue. Economists should be aware of diverse schools of thought within economics, and should be aware of developments in other disciplines, particularly the social sciences.
In March 2003 economics students at Harvard launched their own petition, demanding from its economics department an introductory course that would have “better balance and coverage of a broader spectrum of views” and that would “not only teach students the accepted modes of thinking, but also challenge students to think critically and deeply about conventional truths.”2
Students have not been alone in mounting increasing pressure on the status quo. Thousands of economists from scores of countries have also in various forms taken up the cause for broadband economics under the banner “Post-Autistic Economics” and the slogan “sanity, humanity and science” The PAE movement is not about trying to replace neoclassical economics with another partial truth, but rather about reopening economics for free scientific inquiry, making it a pursuit where empiricism outranks a priorism and where critical thinking rules instead of ideology.
Policy Implications of Post-Autistic Economics
经济学后向改革的政策含义
The neoclassical monopoly in the classroom and its prohibition on critical thinking means that it brainwashes successive generations of students into viewing economic reality exclusively through its concepts, which more often than not misrepresent or veil the world, especially today’s world. Nearly all of these neoclassical notions have a bearing on judgements about social, cultural and economic policy. Consequently, if society were to learn to think about economic matters outside the neoclassical conceptual system, it would almost certainly choose different policies. One of Post-Autistic Economics’ (PAE) projects has been to expose some of the many conceptual lunacies of today’s mainstream, both in terms of the concepts it uses and the concepts it lacks. Drawing on recent essays by PAE economists in A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics, especially the chapters by Michael A. Bernstein, Geoffrey Hodgson, Peter Söderbaum, Hugh Stretton, Richard Wolff, Robert Costanza, Herman E. Daly, Jean Gadrey and Edward Fullbrook,* this brief article briefly considers ten such concepts.
Neoclassical economics regards competition as a state rather than as a process. It defines perfect competition as a market with a large number of firms with identical products, costs structures, production techniques and market information. But in real life competition is a process by which firms continually seek to re-establish the conditions of their own profitability. To compete in a market requires firms to seek out and exploit differences between them in production, technology, distribution, access to information and awareness of trends in consumption. These differences are the essential dimensions in which competition takes place. Once the neoclassical conception of competition becomes imbedded in the student’s mind, appreciation of real-world competition, and hence the policies that might enhance it, becomes logically impossible.
Neoclassical economists love to talk about freedom of choice. But this is pure rhetoric, because they define rationality in a way that eliminates free choice from their conceptual space. By rationality they mean that an agent’s choices are in conformity with an ordering or scale of preferences. The “rational” agent chooses among the alternatives available that one which is highest on his ranking. Rational behaviour simply means behaviour in accordance with some ordering of alternatives in terms of relative desirability. In order for this approach to have any predictive power, it must be assumed that the preferences do not change over some period of time. So the basic condition of neoclassical rationality is that individuals must forego choice in favour of some past reckoning, thereafter acting as automata. This conceptual elimination of freedom of choice, in both its everyday and philosophical meanings, gives neoclassical theory the hypothetical determinacy that its Newtonian inspired metaphysics require. No indeterminacy; no choice. No determinacy; no neoclassical model. This is far from just an academic matter, because society needs an economics that is able to address questions regarding freedom of choice.
No terms in neoclassical economics are more sacrosanct than rational choice and rationality. Everyone identities with these words, because everyone wants to think of themselves as rational. But few people realize that economists give these words an ultra eccentric meaning. Neoclassical economics begins with an a priori conception of markets and economies as determinate systems that by the action of individual agents alone tend toward an efficient and market-clearing equilibrium. This requires that the individual agents, like the bodies in Newton’s system, behave in a prescribed manner. Neoclassicalists have deduced the particular pattern of behaviour that would make their imagined world logically possible, then named it “rational choice” or “rationality” and then declared that that is the way real people behave. But thankfully they don’t. Everyday economic actors do many things that by the neoclassical meaning of “rational” are “irrational”. Looking to the choices of other consumers as guides to what one might buy; buying a stock because you believe other people will be buying it and so increase its value, spending your money in a spirit of spontaneity rather than stopping to calculate the consequences and alternatives up to the limits of your cognitive powers; a taste for change, that is, buying something because you did not previously prefer it; these common consumer behaviours are all prohibited under the neoclassical notions of rational choice and rationality and so outside its scope of analysis.
These failings connect with another. Neoclassical economics is by its own axioms incapable of offering a coherent conceptualisation of the individual or economic agent. From where do the preferences that supposedly dictate the individual’s choice come from? Not from interpersonal relations, because if individual demands were interdependent, they would not be additive and thus the market demand function – neoclassicalism’s key analytical tool – would be undefined. And not from society, because neoclassicalism’s Newtonian atomism translates as methodological individualism, meaning that society is to be explained in terms of individuals and never the other way around.
This leaves an awful lot in the dark. In the main, despite the neoclassical axioms, we all categorise and classify according to prevailing cultural norms. Likewise our tastes and preferences for this and that reflect the social conventions and institutions with which we interact. Consequently individual choice is unavoidably and inextricably bound up with historically and geographically given social worlds. An economics that has nothing to say about the formation of economic tastes and preferences is silly and irresponsible, especially in an age of consumer societies and in a world now threatened with climate-change or worse.
For half a century neoclassical economics has hid its ideology behind the notion that it calls positive economics. This is the idea that it contains no value judgements because it mentions none. Of course such a notion belongs to an intellectually more naive age than today, but nonetheless it persists as an effective tool of indoctrination of undergraduates. The fact that neoclassical economics requires a highly restricted focus in order to maintain its atomist and determinist metaphysics compels it to make many extreme judgements about what is and is not economically important. There is not space even to list them. But an example is its notion of “economic man”, which is acutely ideological, as it emphasizes some roles and relationships and excludes others. By allowing only decisions based on utility maximization, it excludes other forms of ethics. As an economic agent, each individual acts in many roles, not just market ones, and is guided by his or her “ideological orientation”. That orientation may be founded on utilitarianism or not. It may for example be based on social and environmental ethics. PAE economists do not believe that economists have the right to select one ethics as the “correct” one for framing economic analysis. Furthermore the neoclassical insistence upon the utilitarian ideology legitimises a kind of “market ideology” and “consumerism” that increasingly appears dangerous to society and sidelines the debate about Sustainable Development.
Like rationality, nearly everyone thinks efficiency is a good idea. Neoclassical economists adore using this word, especially when addressing the public. But the meaning of “efficiency” always depends on what you choose to count. For example, suppose five firms all manage to lower by the same amounts the production cost and selling price of a standard product that they all produce. One does it by cutting its workers’ pay, another by working them longer hours, another by getting materials at lower prices from a poorer country, another by replacing some of its workers with robots, and another by inventing machinery improvements that allow it to cut work hours with no loss of output, profit, jobs or pay. Are all of these changes equally efficient (or inefficient)? A neoclassical economist will answer yes, because the five firms all end up producing the same product at the same cost and selling it at the same price. For them that is all that matters.
The prevailing mainstream also holds that in the realm of public affairs its concept of “efficiency” can and should determine the net balance between the positives (total benefits) and negatives (total costs) that would result from an economic policy or act. In place of public debate economists would substitute “cost-benefit analysis”. But any such analysis depends on the consequences selected and the kinds of “measurements” made. No efficiency claim is ever based on an identification of all the consequences, and quantitative quesstimates of the future inevitably have a crystal-ball dimension. In the final analysis, “efficient”, like “beautiful” is little more than a way of expressing a positive opinion.
Mainstream economics, and in consequence most policy dialogue, conflates two very different meanings of economic growth that are in common usage and with GNP mistakenly taken to be a measure of both. There is quantitative growth meaning an increase in the quantity of production and consumption, and there is qualitative growth meaning an improvement in well-being. For example, an epidemic may lead to growth of medical expenditure and hence increase GNP but not well-being. Pollution and congestion lead to huge expenditures to escape them (e.g., commuting from the suburbs, double glazing, air filters, security measures), the creation of new industries and an ever larger GNP but they also decrease well-being. Quantitative growth that causes negative qualitative growth is also called uneconomic growth. It is both a reality and a concept with which policy makers must come to terms, the sooner the better.
Closely related to these new anti-neoclassical concepts is another one, sustainable development. This refers to the physical scale of the economy relative to the ecosystem. Ecological economists view the economy as an open subsystem of the larger ecosystem which is finite, non-growing and, except for solar energy, materially closed. This point of view compels asking questions regarding scale. How large is the economic subsystem relative to the earth’s ecosystem? What is its maximum possible size? What is its most desirable size in terms of human welfare? These questions, around which policy decisions will and must increasingly be made, are not found in standard economics textbooks. Neoclassical economics can not accommodate the concept of sustainable development because if adopted as a goal it requires that goods be valued in part by their contribution to that goal and not solely on their contribution to individual utility maximisation.
The close to monopoly position of neoclassical economics is incompatible with normal ideas of democracy. Economics has some of the qualities of a science, but because of the very nature of its subject matter it is forever and fundamentally ideological. It is best not to deceive oneself and others about that. Economics’ preoccupation with values and worldly acts means that in a democratic society it has a moral responsibility to promote the exploration of economic knowledge from more than one point of view so as to make possible the informed and intelligent debate and discussion that democracy requires. But the hegemony of neoclassical economics means that departments of economics have become political propaganda centres. In 2002, Joseph Stiglitz, a recent winner of the so-called Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote in The Guardian that economics as taught “in America's graduate schools . . . bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science.” Is this a legitimate use of public funds? What is certain is that it is a dangerous state of affairs, but one that is now being challenged. The PAE movement immodestly seeks over the next ten years a revolution: the transformation of economics into a genuinely pluralistic enterprise wishing to contribute to, rather than subvert, democratic processes. The movement’s success depends in part on other disciplines and professions withdrawing their patronage from the neoclassical hegemony in favour of the now thousands of economists working for the new order.
Note
* A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics, edited by Edward Fullbrook, Anthem Press 2004
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