How the campaign against defunct economics is growing

“Plain men,” said Keynes, who think themselves devoid of influence – sensible, common sense types, in other words – “are often the slaves of some defunct economist.”

This is a useful quotation which I for one use a great deal to explain our stance regarding conventional economics. We are not against the honourable progression of imaginative and intuitive economics. We are emphatically against the defunct version, which has taken root so deeply among those who govern us that they are now powerless to tackle the looming economic disaster.

Unfortunately, as the protesters in Wall Street, and outside St Paul’s – and in many other cities around the world – are pointing out, this defunct economics has taken the place of what used to be our democracy.

If we were a still a democracy, we would have other levers we could pull – we could avoid the runaway train of global finance that still hurtles along – we could turn away from climate disaster. 

But our leaders still sit, like dear caught in the headlamps – trying to hold together a big idea that is now in tatters.

What is fascinating is how much the protest against defunct economics is spreading across the globe.

Bolivian president Eva Morales has backed down from a new road planned through a rainforest reserve after mass protests. 

Former nef director Ed Mayo, Secretary General of Co-operatives UK, has been blogging about the 100,000 landless people and families in India who are marching 300 km to Delhi, calling for access to land, food and the right to security. The march is organised by Ekta Parishad, a mass movement focused on non-violent activism. 

But one of the most relevant aspects of the protest for us here at nef is the walk out by economics students at Harvard, complaining about the narrowness of the economics they are being taught.

“As Harvard undergraduates,” says their open letter, “we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.”

This is precisely the same point made by the economics graduate students at the Sorbonne in 1999 when they launched the Post Autistic Economics Movement and it is an idea that is now beginning finally to cause discomfort among the high priests of defunct economics.

But there isn’t much time. The hope – and there is some of that – lies in the sheer intractability of what lies before us. A deal to help the financial system hobble on for a few more months may be stitched together one more time, and the ubermensch in our financial services will carry on sucking the life out of the world and profiting by it for a little longer, it is true. But something now has to shift, and therein lies the probability of change.