New School Economic Review

Publish Now – Kanye West remix

by Benjamin on May 29, 2009

This is hilarious.

Publish Now !

Courtesy of The Metrics Gang or our fellow Economics Ph.D. grunts at Berkeley this one from Vimeo - it’s great !

And the economics profession shifts a bit more

by Benjamin on May 26, 2009

To be fair, it took me several decades before I learned to appreciate Keynes in the original. Maybe a reread will make me see the depths of Minsky’s insight across the board. Or maybe not.

I guess the point is that you can be a bad writer and a great economist. And I really am gravitating toward a Keynes-Fisher-Minsky view of macro, although of the three I’d much rather read Keynes.

That would be Paul Krugman in his NYT blog as he is reading Minsky’s Stabilizing and Unstable Economy. I am not suggesting the whole world has changed, but as ever, in the afterglow of a crisis, the books of Minsky and Keynes are cracked open for another look.

Toxic Economic Textbooks

by Benjamin on May 19, 2009

The Post Autistic Economic Review – now known under the uninspiring sobriquet Real World Economic Review – is pushing a new movement against the problems of traditional textbooks in economics – Toxic Textbooks – saying they are to blame for the recent problems amongst other things.

The current economic meltdown is not the result of natural causes or human conspiracy, but because society at all levels became infected with false beliefs regarding the nature of economic reality. And the primary sources of this infection are the “neoclassical” or “mainstream” textbooks long used in introductory economics courses in universities throughout the world.

This is not a new complaint, in fact it’s been around a while, but the language has certainly gotten a lot stronger in this call for student action. Textbooks are however here to stay so this also requires academics to write ‘good’ textbooks, which is a challenge, which would avoid the problems outlined in the Toxic Textbook Manifesto.

Every year these “mainstream” books serve to indoctrinate millions of students in a quaint ideology (perfect rationality of economic agents, market efficiency, the invisible hand, etc.) cunningly disguised as science. This mass miseducation deprives society of the moral and intellectual capacities it needs in order to design and maintain the support systems required by market economies.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

by Benjamin on February 13, 2009

Since the start of term I have attended quite a few introductory sessions to various economics classes. Here I keep hearing my colleagues telling the students that they are privileged to be living in such exciting times, and to learn economics when it is so topical.

What everyone neglects to tell the students, is that we have no idea what’s going on, while the slides and theories from last years classes – which we may recycle – won’t shed any light on what’s actually going on…

Shame really, because I think it is a great time to be doing economics, but now people are excited about studying the actual economy and not slavishly believing in the complete truth of economics as revealed by standard axioms. So let’s try and reverse the process Leijonhufvud complained about:

Once the Cobb-Douglass production function was invented, no economist has since studied production
-Axel Leijonhufvud (2002: 23-4)

Go on, read (or teach?) the U.S. stimulus package (or maybe our suggested edit to the package), find out how money supply really works in the economy, see what institutions actually do and how the global financial system works (Basel II anyone?), without having to believe in the effective market hypothesis. It’s a brave new world out there – at least for the next few months.

NSER 01 re-published

by NSER Editorial Board on January 13, 2009

We have re-published the first issue of the New School Economic Review, with a brand new cover and index, but otherwise completely the same as the original.

Download the full Issue

Where did the Rational Agent come from?

by NSER Editorial Board on

The social phenomena political economy and economics aspire to explain and predict have from the beginning of speculation about these subject presented two aspects. On the one hand it is clear from our daily experience that economic phenomena (prices, production, consumption, and so forth) arise from individual actions (going to the store and buying something, contracting for the construction of a building and the like). On the other hand, these individual actions always present themselves as aggregate, statistical phenomena (the market price, gross domestic product, etc.) A peculiarity of economics is that the very phenomena it studies take a quantitative form (market transactions, accounts) produced directly from the phenomena. The profit and loss of a company, or the net worth of a household, are quantities that are inherent in the existence of the company of the household. The economist may have to take some trouble to collect this data and organize it, but is not required, like the physicist or biologist, to devise instruments to represent the phenomenon studied (the behavior of the electron or the cell, for example) in a quantitative form.

Download full paper here

Foley, Duncan K. 2004. “The strange history of the Economic Agent.” New School Economic Review 1(1): 82-94

Search for Good Science – a personal memoir

by NSER Editorial Board on

I have been arguing for some years that all of the economics with which I am acquainted, whether orthodox or heterodox, is bad science. Rather than to look for an independent definition of bad science, a more constructive approach is positively to define good science and then to define bad science as its complement.

All good science is inspiration constrained by evidence and observation. If this statement is itself good science, then it too must be inspired and it must be constrained by evidence and observation.

Download the paper

Moss, Scott. 2004. “Search for Good Science: A personal memoir”. New School Economic Review 1(1): 3-8

The North-South environmental crisis: An unequal ecological exchange analysis

by NSER Editorial Board on

This paper offers a political economy problematisation of the current trends of production towards environmental degradation, while offering an environmental critique of mainstream economic thought and capitalist exchange and production. A case is made for a re-appraisal of ‘unequal exchange’ analysis of international trade. First, this essay explains the evolution of economic thought on trade, offering a brief explanation of where ‘unequal exchange’ analysis comes from. In Part two, unequal ecological exchange is introduced and a political analysis of how and why the South1 allows its environmental capacity to be appropriated is discussed. Part Three discusses the ecological impact of the current global trading system, and Part Four looks at the phenomenon of ‘Perverse Subsidies’ and their influence on free trade arguments. Finally Part Five examines responses to the environmental crisis, by questioning mainstream economists’ optimism about the ecological crisis. Further addressing the ‘ecological modernization’ paradigm and the Red-Green approach, in order to show the salience of an unequal  ecological exchange methodology for understanding the links between the expansion of global capitalism, environmental degradation and international inequality.

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Economics and Ethics: Amartya Sen as Point of Departure

by NSER Editorial Board on January 12, 2009

Economics as a discipline, in teaching, research and policy, is very poor at ethics. There are six inter-related reasons for this. First, whilst the rigid distinction between positive and normative economics (and theory and fact) has long been recognized in principle to be invalid, the discipline has continued in practice as if nothing were wrong with the separation(s) between the two. Second, economics is negligent of, and backward in, methodology, and so unlikely to interrogate its own ethical or other foundations. Third, economics also neglects its own history as a discipline, and so its own shifting ethical approaches and content. Fourth, economics has been isolated from the other social sciences so that their contribution to ethical questions has been ignored. Fifth, mainstream economics has always been and is now almost absolutely intolerant of heterodox alternatives from which ethical differences might be teased out. Sixth, in sum, with method, methodology, history of economic thought, interdisciplinarity and heterodoxy sidelined to marginal status, this has all meant that  economics is extraordinarily lacking in circumspection around the (ethical) meaning and implications of its standard concepts such as production, consumption, utility and the market, let alone development itself. It stumbles among these as if partially sighted, a lack of vision that is compounded in turning to development where the urge to prescribe is rarely matched by attention to context.

Download full paper here

Fine, Ben. 2004. “Economics and Ethics: Amartya Sen as Point of Departure.” New School Economic Review 1(1): 95-104