Self-regarding economics departments at prestigious academic institutions no longer bother to teach the history of economic thought
Robert Skidelsky is a historian, an epic biographer of John Maynard Keynes, and a prolific debater in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords. He calls What’s Wrong with Economics? a “primer,”
Although the neoclassical hegemony was disrupted by the Great Depression and the rise of Keynesian models, that period proved to be merely a 40-year digression. The economics profession today is as Skidelsky describes it: an army of neoclassical technicians
... academics compete for attention, citations, rankings, promotions, and – above all – the approval of those who taught them those tools in the first place.
As such, Skidelsky’s appeal for a return to an economics that is rooted in history, sensitive to ethics, and alert to the limits of the “self-regulating” market is doomed to fall on deaf ears.
In The Age of Fragmentation, Italian economist Alessandro Roncaglia, formerly of Sapienza University of Rome, provides a wide-ranging critical history of contemporary mainstream economic thought.
Harvard University economist Stephen A. Marglin’s Raising Keynes.
The latest group of heretics are the advocates of Modern Monetary Theory, who have developed Keynes and Hyman Minsky’s real-time, uncertainty-driven, bank-money chartalism into a full-fledged critique of fraud and regulatory failure in the financial sector.
In leading universities, governed at their highest levels these days by financiers, this group, no surprise, is treated as beneath contempt.
James K. Galbraith Project Syndicate 23 July 2021
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