Solow on class

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat Jan 23 10:14:45 PST 1999


Henry C.K. Liu wrote:


>I would like to hear your reaction to the NYTime article as a professional.

I'm not a professional economist. I took 5 semesters of undergraduate economics. I do read a fair amount of the economics literature, but decidedly from the outside. My impression is that the discipline is technically elegant and intellectually bankrupt, completely lost in a specific kind of largely empty theorizing, lurching between irrelevance and apologetics. It's completely divorced from the rest of intellectual life - politics, psychology, sociology, history, culture, all of it. (Some feminist economists are an exception to this rule, I should say.) Uchitelle touches on some of this in his article, but he's still too kind, which is what you might expect from a New York Times reporter. I'm with Jim O'Connor, who says that economics is a criminal enterprise.

Doug



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