Anwar Shaikh vs. Economist
by Benjamin on June 16, 2010
A little over a month ago Wynne Godley passed away. He was a fine economist, and it is not for me to eulogise him, suffice it to say that the great and the good did, and his work will be missed. Among those eulogisers was The Economist. They have spent the last 6 months quietly criticising mainstream economics and its over-simplifying approach to the economy, this was their chance to remember a man who constructed stock-flow consistent empirical models, and did some real analysis of the economy – not economics. They fluffed it. That is why I was so happy to see Prof. Anwar Shaikh (and others) replying to The Economist in print this week.
SIR – Your obituary of Wynne Godley (May 29th) did an injustice to his considerable intellectual achievements in macroeconomics and his courage in going against the orthodoxy that has ruled the economics profession for the past three decades. That very orthodoxy is now under attack all across the world, its otiose theoretical constructions having been exposed to the harsh light of actual economic events. Godley’s contributions to macroeconomics include his 1978 work on pricing with Kenneth Coutts and William Nordhaus, the textbook written in 1983 with Francis Cripps that inspired the “New Cambridge” group, and his 2006 book on monetary economics, written with Marc Lavoie.
His often-cited success as a macroeconomic forecaster came about precisely because he developed a systematic framework for analysing the impact of potential developments, applied first to the British economy at Cambridge and subsequently to America’s economy at the Levy Economics Institute.
Instead of taking the trouble to address these contributions, your piece settled for personal gossip, ending with a snide comment that “against a background like this, a little waywardness in the world of macroeconomics seems entirely forgivable.” (The Economist, 11 June 2010 – on-line here)
I agree whole-heartedly, and am happy to see this in print. Wynne Godley should be an inspiration to economists of all colours, a point seemingly forgotten in the original obituary, even if everyone, including The Economist, is calling for a different approach to our subject.
Tags: Anwar Shaikh, Obituary, The Economist, Wynne Godley
