Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Toxic Textbooks

Edward Fullbook, a post autistic economist, is organizing a community to encourage students to protest orthodox economics textbooks.

6 comments:

DBC Reed said...

Since the present crisis started in the property market,perhaps more heed could be taken of land prices in conventional economics.

Patch said...

Centuries ago, a similar crisis started in the market for tulips. The kind of asset does not matter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Mike Beggs said...

They ought to dump the 'post-autistic' term... it's not really any better than calling it 'post-retarded economics' or 'non-spastic economics', which would be seen as offensive!

Robert Searle said...

There is far more advanced way of doing things beyond the narrow confines of neo-classical economics. It is my developing project of Transfinancial Economic which can be found as an entry article at the p2pfoundation. Click my name..

RS

Victor Aguilar said...

Ludwig von Mises writes:Economics in the second German Reich, as represented by the government-appointed university professors, degenerated into an unsystematic, poorly assorted collection of various scraps of knowledge borrowed from history, geography, technology, jurisprudence, and party politics, larded with deprecatory remarks about the errors in the "abstractions" of the Classical School.

After 1866, the men who came into the academic career had only contempt for "bloodless abstractions." They published historical studies, preferably such as dealt with labor conditions of the recent past. Many of them were firmly convinced that the foremost task of economists was to aid the "people" in the war of liberation they were waging against the "exploiters."

This was the position Gustav Schmoller embraced with regard to economics. Again and again he blamed the economists for having prematurely made inferences from quantitatively insufficient material. What, in his opinion, was needed in order to substitute a realistic science of economics for the hasty generalizations of the British "armchair" economists was more statistics, more history, and more collection of "material." Out of the results of such research the economists of the future, he maintained, would one day develop new insights by "induction."

Does Gustav Schmoller remind you of anyone alive today?

James Devine writes:
The original statements by the rebellious French economics students define autistic economics in terms of its one-sided and exclusionary interest in "imaginary worlds," "uncontrolled use of mathematics" and the absence of pluralism of approaches in economics. The hard-core autistic walling off from the societal environment can be seen most strongly in the specific, highly abstract, axiomatic school that the students protested against.

If this comparison seems unimportant, recall what the German Historical School led to.

Ludwig von Mises writes:
The political significance of the work of the Historical School consisted in the fact that it rendered Germany safe for the ideas, the acceptance of which made popular with the German people all those disastrous policies that resulted in the great catastrophes. The aggressive imperialism that twice ended in war and defeat, the limitless inflation of the early 1920s, the Zwangswirtschaft and all the horrors of the Nazi regime were achievements of politicians who acted as they had been taught by the champions of the Historical School.

At this early stage of the Post-Autistic Movement, the most obvious point of comparison with the Nazis is their campaign to ban academic papers.

Pluralist said...

Why stop at blacklisting autistic people? Now that Obama has the authority to conduct drone strikes on U.S. soil, we have the perfect vehicle for eliminating the authors of toxic textbooks. Just Google "axiomatic economics" to locate any economists who are using the axiomatic method and Obama will take them out!