Читать книгу The New Economics онлайн | страница 17

Finally, social media has allowed student movements critical of Neoclassical economics to evolve, flourish and persist in a way that was impossible before the Internet. I led the first ever student revolt against Neoclassical economics, at Sydney University in 1973 (Butler et al. 2009).¹¹ This revolt succeeded, in that the University finally agreed to create a Department of Political Economy to house the dissidents, but the protest and its success were restricted to just one university in far-away Australia. French students established the ‘Protest Against Autistic Economics’ in 2000, which had somewhat more traction, but no changes in economics teaching occurred: its main legacy was an online journal called the Real World Economic Review.

The real breakthrough came with a protest by economics students at the University of Manchester¹² in the UK in 2012, in response to the failure of their teachers to take the GFC seriously in their macroeconomics courses. As they put it, ‘The economics we were learning seemed separate from the economic reality that the world was facing, and devoid from the crisis that had made many of us interested in economics to begin with’. Their Post-Crash Economics movement in turn spawned the international Rethinking Economics campaign, which now has groups in about 100 universities across the world (you should join one, if you’re not already a member), and inspired the Institute for New Economic Thinking to fund the Young Scholars’ Initiative.

There are therefore students eager for approaches to economics that break away from the Neoclassical mainstream, methods of analysis which can easily supplant the dated equilibrium methods used by Neoclassical economics, and rival schools of thought with an intellectual tradition spanning almost a century, on which an alternative paradigm can be constructed. What we lack is a university system in which these conditions can foment a paradigm shift, as has occurred several times in physics in the last one and a half centuries, but not once in economics.