post-autistic economics media archives

The Australian 6th January 2001 Ramona Koval's Focus column Some of the most  famous economists of the eighteenth, nineteenth and 20th centuries never studied economics.  Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, for starters and later Alfred Marshall, Schumpeter, Keynes, Galbraith and Arrow.   They were all educated in other fields and came to economics skeptical about its abstract theories and more observant of actual economic behavior. A fascinating tension between theory and reality in economics teaching started in France in the middle of last year, when university students circulated a petition on the Internet that urged their fellow students to object to the way economics was taught. They were against the domination of economic rationalist theories, the marginalisation of critical and reflective thought in their academic courses, and the use of more and more complex mathematical models.  Some argued that the drive to make economics more like physics was flawed, and that it should be wrenched back to its more social aspects. They called the kind of economics they were being taught "autistic", that is, divorced from reality, and called for a post-autistic economics that would "rescue economics from its autistic and socially irresponsible state." Many of their teachers joined them and initiated a public debate that began in Le Monde, and has spread to other media.  French Minister of Education, Jack Lang set up a commission to investigate the student's complaints, headed by renowned French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi.  The questioning of economic rationalism did not stop with the French. Similar discussions were held in the UK and Belgium, and at the 10th World Congress of Social Economists at the University of Cambridge, it was reported that a kind of "Stalinization" was afoot, phasing out courses teaching the history of ideas in economics in favour of a less critical acceptance of the economic rationalist status quo. The battle lines were being drawn, and www.paecon.net was the site for much of the action  In Australia, it's as well to recognize that we have long had a prophet of Post-autism in the presence of Adelaide based social theorist, Professor Hugh Stretton. Nearly six years ago I interviewed him about his huge unpublished economics textbook that was not based on rationalist theory, but took into account alternative views. He was scathing about the very use of the term "rationalist" as an abuse of the English Language. Rational - as a useful word - used to mean rightly adapted to your purposes.  In Princeton, 50 years ago, the Americans used it to mean doing something for yourself alone. Doing something for anybody else is "irrational", and doing something for any third purpose is "arational." "If everybody was a rational optimiser on an individual account, firms would fall apart tomorrow morning - everyone would rob the firm. Most firms work on a mixture of self-interest and cooperation and some trust, much as most public agencies do. But economic rationalists want you to believe that self-interest makes private employees faultlessly efficient and public employees reliably inefficient. It's a stupid mistake." "People want to live in a decent society, as well as doing well for themselves. A great deal of collective behavior and a great deal of unselfish and altruistic behavior is utterly rational. People have moral and social as well as self-serving purposes." The thrust of Stretton's work was to re-establish a moral sense in the public domain - to counter the view of the selfish and greedy "rational man" so beloved of his intellectual enemies. A mixture of militancy and gentility, he struck me at the time as a kind of failed knight, in his words   "an old Aussie Battler."  He was pessimistic about finding a publisher for his opus, since most economics courses taught the prevailing view. Fortunately he did get it published last year as Economics: A new Introduction, (UNSW Press). One reviewer said: " Stretton's book is right for the times because the times are wrong. Future historians will ponder over the capture of the commanding heights of the world's economy by religious maniacs masquerading as scientists in the 1980's and 1990's. They will draw comparisons between Calvin's Geneva or Spain under the Inquisition." Let's start the new millennium by remembering that far from merely tilting at windmills, we can now see that the blades are rusting, and there may well be an alternative way ahead.  Hail brave knight!