post-autistic economics network book reviews

Maverick spans great divide By: Alex Millmow A heterodox new economics text does away with the micro/macro schisms that confuse students, writes Alex Millmow Economics: A New Introduction By Hugh Stretton, University of NSW Press, $55 AT last month's annual gabfest of economists held on the Gold Coast, I wandered among the bookstands looking at the dazzling array of first-year texts. While the first-year market seems competitive, the competition is more superficial than real. Once you take away the Disneyfied glitz, the graphics, the teaching aids, you find the beef, or syllabus, is essentially the same. The contents are what one wit called ``Nintendo economics'' overlaid with a puerile, simple morality. The dominance of North American influences over the nature, syllabus, methodology, morality and rhetoric of modern economics is on display in first-year texts. While most have Australian adaptions, the end product is unashamedly American, despite the increasingly baroque style in which texts are written to differentiate them from competitors. Ultimately the bias rubs through to affect instructor and student alike; scratch an economist these days and you'll get a supply-side response. Some economists see little need for John Maynard Keynes and macro-economic policy; Gregory Mankiw relegates Keynes to the back of his textbook. No wonder he has a poodle called Keynes. Most economists, in fact, will not converse with you unless it is in a regression equation form, suitably with a high r squared. Economists, in short, have a communication problem -- not just among their peers, but with the wider world. In the 1990s, economic enrolments continued to fall as a percentage of the undergraduate market. There has been no upturn in local enrolments as there has in the US. A laissez-faire approach might be fine, but bottom-line vigilant vice-chancellors and deans, in the fashionable practice of closing down courses that don't generate a profitable quorum, pose a threat to such snugness. Short of a name change -- say to wealth management -- and drastic cosmetic surgery, economics is in a serious state. As a post-Keynesian of some description, the problem of falling student interest in economics intrigues me. Perhaps the problem might lie in the stuff we teach the dotcom youngsters. I had the horrifying experience the other week of asking my introductory macro-economics class how many were going to do an economics major in their business degree. Not a hand went up. I have chosen the most readable and reader-friendly macro text I could find in a bid to subvert their minds, but it seems that, already exposed to a hefty swag of marshallian micro-economics, their minds are already made up. They will remain conscripts, not volunteers, to the cause of economics. If the problem lies with what we call paradigm maintenance, some respite is on the way. One of Australia's great social thinkers, Hugh Stretton, has just published his estimable version of an economics counter-textbook. That this work -- which was 12 years in the making -- has been released is newsworthy in itself. Stretton had 17 rejections from publishers until Pluto Press in London, in association with University of NSW Press, came to the rescue. Interestingly, Stretton told me some of the reputable academic publishers quite liked the text, but their marketing staff advised against going ahead with buying the rights. That says as much about marketers' contribution to worthy things as it does the art of paradigm maintenance. In a sense, though, those reluctant publishers may have been right. This a serious tome for the serious student looking for an alternative to the orthodoxy. There will not be many of them. This book could not be more different from glossy, streamlined mainstream texts. It is a heterodox, idiosyncratic text, in which the clear schism between micro-economics and macro-economics that often confuses students is done away with. This may present more pedagogic problems to lecturers than it would to new students. Stretton spends the first seven chapters discussing how economists should theorise about economic behaviour and minimise, if one can, the role of values and beliefs. Here Stretton, in an easy conversational style, draws upon the institutional tradition of evolutionary political economy to encourage a more direct, open-eyed investigation of economic behaviour, using all workable methods but checking against a reliance upon excessive model-building and econometrics. He wants students to think for themselves, to make moral and political judgments once they have mastered economics. Moreover, he wants economics to return to its philosophical roots, to become a moral science. A good social democrat, Stretton draws upon that well of thought besides post-Keynesian, green and feminist strands of economics. Nor is he adverse to using commonsense, or the history or philosophy, in coming to grips with economic issues. Of course, in that regard Stretton is well aware that apart from the dumbing-down phenomenon or the wish to be politically correct -- trying not to teach the freshers too much -- many lecturers will give it a wide berth. They might have to, as it is more than 800 pages long, and is densely packed with an ambitious tableau of political economy in 60 chapters, covering issues such as childhood and social capital. Stretton recommends that his omnibus text be used, ideally, over four semesters -- ah, if only students had that luxury ... or the inclination! It can equally be used as a graduate text, and even as a manual for policy-makers, journalists or financial economists. The reality is, of course, that the text will only be adopted for graduate and honours students. However, it already reeks of a collector's piece: a classic that many economists, troubled with the state of their discipline, will buy but only fitfully read, unless they end up stranded on a desert island. Inspired by intellectual mentors such as Thomas Balogh, who wrote The Irrelevance of Conventional Economics (1982) and Paul Streeten, the lateral-thinking development economist who founded the journal World Development, Stretton set out to write a counter-text to repudiate the neo-liberalism that holds modern economics in its thrall. He is well aware of his textbook competitors, who he holds are about ``making bad things more and more easy to absorb''. By bad things Stretton intends notions such as the Thatcherite mentality of ``small government'', the natural rate of unemployment, the primacy of the market, rational expectations -- indeed, the whole Hollywood-inspired rubric of feel-good economics that constitutes the mainstream offerings. All power to him. Alex Millmow teaches economics at Charles Sturt University.