Post-Autistic Economics Movement

Over the weekend, Mark Thoma bristled at Stanley Alcorn and Ben Solarz' article, "The Autistic Economist." I liked the article, and was glad both to see that it had been published at the Yale Economic Review and that Thoma daylighted it on his blog. Although I would rather that Thoma had read it a bit differently.

People interested in Ecological Economics should be familiar with the Post-Autistic Economics Network (PAEN), since Ecological Economics plays a prominent role in the makeup of the PAEN. Here is a Snip from Alcorn and Solarz, followed by my comments to Mark on his blog.

The Autistic Economist, by Stanley Alcorn and Ben Solarz, Yale Economic Review, summer 2006: ...The caricature of the economist – bumbling, impractical, disconnected from the object of his work – underpins a set of surprisingly sophisticated criticisms leveled against the discipline, particularly its realism, method, and ideology. None of these critiques is particularly new, nor is any entirely unique to economics. But over the last few years, they have been asserted against the dominant economic pedagogy in general and the neoclassical framework in particular with new force...

"We wish to escape from imaginary worlds!" proclaimed a group of French economics students in 2000, petitioning for broad changes in their economics curricula. "We no longer want to have this autistic science imposed upon us."

The use of the French term "autisme" harkens back to an older meaning – "abnormal subjectivity, acceptance of fantasy rather than reality" – but it also refers to the continuum of neurological disorders. Steve Keen ... at the University of West Sydney and the author of Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences, sees the aptness of the term as the strongest point of the critique. "It asserts that neoclassical economics has the characteristics of an autistic child," he said, criticizing the manner in which the discipline "hangs on to its preconceptions, when serious analysis shows that they are untenable." ...

I was surprised to see Mark Thoma's reaction, taking it all very personally, not realizing (or admitting) that the criticisms were aimed at economists who are more ideologically/methodologically narrow than Thoma. Here is my comment on Mark's blog:

I think Mark's reactions to Alcorn and Solarz does a disservice to some very worthwhile aims of the Post-Autistic Economics movement. Although I too admit that some of the criticisms the Post Autistic Economics Network (PAEN) movement's practitioners level against "economics" ought to be more narrowly focused (as is done sometimes on the PAEN website -- see below).

In particular Mark's reaction may cause some not to investigate the PAEN movement, but instead to believe that it is just ramblings from a bunch of crackpots. Maybe it is, but I hope that the movement is not dismissed too easily and for the wrong reasons.

Clearly anyone who has wandered into the Post-Autistic Economics Network website and browsed for a while realizes that the movement doesn't paint all economics with the same negative connotations and caricatures. Otherwise the economists who write there would be painting themselves into a corner.

Go to their website and drawn your own conclusions. http://www.paecon.net/. I recommend that you also subscribe to their quarterly review (free via email, with online archives on the net), then debate the value (or lack of value) of what they are talking about.

Note that The Post-Autistic Economics movement is a student's revolt against, particularly, neo-conservative ideological bias in some economics classrooms. See, e.g. Post-Autistic Economics, By Deborah Campbell

Sitting in an overcrowded near Harvard Square, talking over the din of full-volume Fleetwood Mac and espresso fueled chatter, Gabe Katsh describes his disillusionment with economics teaching at Harvard University. The red-haired 21-year-old makes it clear that not all of Harvard's elite student body, who pay close to $40,000 a year, are the "rationally" self-interested beings that Harvard's most influential economics course pegs them as.

"I was disgusted with the way ideas were being presented in this class and I saw it as hypocritical" given that Harvard values critical thinking and the free marketplace of ideas -- that they were then having this course which was extremely doctrinaire," says Katsh. "It only presented one side of the story when there are obviously others to be presented."

For two decades, Harvard's introductory economics class has been dominated by one man: Martin Feldstein. It was a New York Times article on Feldstein titled "Scholarly Mentor To Bush's Team," that lit the fire under the Harvard activist. Calling the Bush economic team a "Feldstein alumni club," the article declared that he had "built an empire of influence that is probably unmatched in his field." Not only that, but thousands of Harvard students "who have taken his, and only his, economics class during their Harvard years have gone on to become policy-makers and corporate executives," the article noted. "I really like it; I've been doing it for 18 years," Feldstein told the Times. "I think it changes the way they see the world."

That's exactly Katsh's problem. As a freshman, he'd taken Ec 10, Feldstein's course. "I don't think I'm alone in thinking that Ec 10 presents itself as politically neutral, presents itself as a science, but really espouses a conservative political agenda and the ideas of this professor, who is a former Reagan advisor, and who is unabashedly Republican," he says. "I don't think I'm alone in wanting a class that presents a balanced viewpoint and is not trying to cover up its conservative political bias with economic jargon."

In his first year at Harvard, Katsh joined a student campaign to bring a living wage to Harvard support staff. Fellow students were sympathetic, but many said they couldn't support the campaign because, as they'd learned in Ec 10, raising wages would increase unemployment and hurt those it was designed to help.

During a three-week sit-in at the Harvard president's office, students succeeded in raising workers' wages, though not to "living wage" standards.

After the living wage "victory," Harvard activists from Students for a Humane and Responsible Economics (SHARE) decided to stage an intervention. This time, they went after the source, leafleting Ec 10 classes with alternative readings. For a lecture on corporations, they handed out articles on corporate fraud. For a free trade lecture, they dispensed critiques of the WTO and IMF. Later, they issued a manifesto reminiscent of the French post-autistic revolt, and petitioned for an alternative class. Armed with 800 signatures, they appealed for a critical alternative to Ec 10. Turned down flat, they succeeded in introducing the course outside the economics department.

Their actions follow on the Kansas City Proposal, an open letter to economics departments "in agreement with and in support of the Post Autistic Economics Movement and the Cambridge Proposal" that was signed by economics students and academics from 22 countries during a conference in Kansas City.

Harvard President Lawrence Summers illustrates the kind of thinking that emerges from neoclassical economics. Summers is the same former chief economist of the World Bank who sparked international outrage after his infamous memo advocating pollution trading was leaked in the early 1990s. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCS [Less Developed Countries]?" the memo inquired. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.... I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted...."…

Comments

[mcewen]

I can see that many feel that the term 'autistic' is viewed negatively, however a neuro-diverse approach to the world has maybe given us the economists we have in the first place. Without them, there would be no theories to debate.
Cheers
http://whitterer-autism.blogspot.com

[Biopolitical]

I am with McEwen. What's wrong with some of economics being autistic? I find it pretty enjoyable. I also think than the "post-autistic" alternatives suffer from too much talk and too little substance.

And now for something completely different...

I am not the openest person in the world and I have sometimes been jokingly called autistic; I have never felt offended by it. Also, a few years ago it happened to me that a driver inside his parked truck in my town's port (La Coruña, Spain) gesticulated at me that he wanted to talk. It was raining heavily, and I hesitated. When I finally approached him he started talking to me in Italian. He spoke very fast and I, trying to make sense of what he was saying, didn't manage to say anything at first. He then asked me, "Sei autista?" Autista in Spanish means autistic and, in the context, the question was hardly surprising to me. I emphatically answered "No."

I later found that autista in Italian means driver.

[John Konop]

YOUR KIDS FUTURE

This is an editorial on the web site economy in crisis. Do you think Americans should be concerned with our kid’s future due to poorly negotiated trade and immigration policy?

PREPARE YOUR KIDS FOR THE FUTURE — AS A SERVANT

EC-In 1994, more than 1 in 8 jobs in America was in manufacturing. In 2014, if US government (Bureau of Labor Statistics) projections are to be believed, that figure will have slipped to less than 1 in 12.

The government is actually telling us in black and white that the policies that they are enacting will decrease absolute and relative manufacturing employment to levels below that of the 1950’s – over 2 million jobs below. In the 1950’s, 30% of US employees were in manufacturing – almost one in three jobs! This country was a relative manufacturing superpower.

In less than 20 years since America put in place some of its most self-devastating policy decisions (NAFTA, WTO, CAFTA, etc.), this country will have almost completely converted from a self-sufficient sovereign state, capable of manufacturing what it needs to sustain and protect itself, to a country of servants – serfs, working at the behest of foreign employers or engaged in the sales, marketing, and distribution of foreign-made goods – working at their discretion, for wages they determine, and forced to pay their prices for needed goods. This is the definition of a servant.

[Victor Aguilar]

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. http://www.economicpopulist.org/?q=content/what-appropriate-what-not-economic-populist

Just because it is not the government, in the sense of actual federal agents, who are burning books does not mean that it is any less wrong or any different than Nazi book burning. That was not done by the government either. It was the German Student Association.

The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit," to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire.

Placards publicized the theses, which attacked "Jewish intellectualism," asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature.

On May 10, 1933 the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books, presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture. On the night of May 10, in most university towns, nationalist students marched in torchlight parades "against the un-German spirit."