Читать книгу The New Economics онлайн | страница 18

Fortunately, the GFC was such an extreme shock to the policy bodies around the world, which were and are still dominated by Neoclassical economists, that at least some of them – such as the OECD, which established the unit New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC) in 2012 (see https://www.oecd.org/naec/) – have started to explore alternative approaches, including the application of ideas from other disciplines (largely physics, engineering and computer programming) to economics. Change is more likely to come from these institutions than from within academic economics itself, though even here, the alternative approaches experience hostility from entrenched Neoclassical economists.

There is also one negative factor that may finally force the change needed in economics, which is closer to the Reformation of a degenerate religion than a standard scientific revolution (Elliott 2017). Climate change is the dominant issue for the human species – and all other species – during the twenty-first century, and the work that Neoclassical economists have done on climate change is, in my considered opinion, the worst work they have ever done (Keen 2020a). And yet Neoclassical economists gave their highest accolade, the deceptively named ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’, to the chief proponent of this work, William Nordhaus. When reality exposes how low grade and utterly misleading this work has been, the revulsion that policymakers and the public will feel at how they have been deceived by economists may finally terminate Neoclassical economics.

I don’t want you to be on the wrong side of this stage in history. If you are a potential or current student of economics, I want to reach you before you embark on, or get too deeply into, a university course of study that will attempt to inculcate a near-religious belief in the Neoclassical paradigm, and that will drive you away if you can’t accept it. I want you to arrive at university knowing of the modern methods of analysis that are commonplace in the sciences and engineering, but which have been excluded from economics by the hegemony of Neoclassical economics. Then, perhaps, there will be a chance for a real revolution in economics, and it can become, if not a fully-fledged science, then at least more like a science and less like a religion.