[lbo-talk] More ideological backlash

Wojtek Sokolowski swsokolowski at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 6 09:34:15 PDT 2009


Nice piece but missing an important point. Economists escape into abstractions not because they are misguided, but because they are venal. As John Kenneth Galbraith once said (quoting from memory) economists are in the business of providing needed conclusions to those in the position to pay for them.

Or looking at this from a sociological perspective, every system of power needs legitimation, and those in the position of power bestow considerable benefits on those venal intellectuals who manufacture such legitimation. Hence the privileged position of priests in pre-modern societies, political scientists in Communist societies, and economists in capitalist societies.

And there is a reason why in the past disgraced "organic intellectuals" of the ruling classes ended up in dungeons or in front of firing squads. The ideas they espoused stood not on reason and logic but on the power of the sword, and thus could only be argued with a sword rather than with logic or reason. This has not changed in the modern times.

Wojtek

--- On Thu, 8/6/09, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:


> From: Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] More ideological backlash
> To: "LBO-Talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Date: Thursday, August 6, 2009, 10:12 AM
> (Robert Skidelsky, "How to rebuild a
> shamed subject")
>
> "Keynes opened the way to political economy; but economists
> opted for a
> regressive research programme, disguised by sophisticated
> mathematics, that
> set it apart. The present crisis gives us an opportunity to
> try again.
>
> The reconstruction of economics needs to start with the
> universities. First,
> degrees in the subject should be broadly based. They should
> take as their
> motto Keynes’s dictum that 'economics is a moral and not
> a natural science'.
> They should contain not just the standard courses in
> elementary
> microeconomics and macroeconomics but economic and
> political history, the
> history of economic thought, moral and political
> philosophy, and sociology.
> Though some specialisation would be allowed in the final
> year, the
> mathematical component in the weighting of the degree
> should be sharply
> reduced. This is a return to the tradition of the Oxford
> Politics,
> Philosophy and Economics (PPE) degree and Cambridge Moral
> Sciences."
>
> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dfc9294a-81ef-11de-9c5e-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>



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