Econ4: Changing the Way We Look at Economics

Fast Company (fastcoexist.com) reports on Econ4:

“We’re economists: we want to promote not only the supply of new economics teaching but also student demand for it.”

 

Read the story and accompanying interview here.

Ethics in economics: a step forward

The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the American Economics Association’s recent decision to require economists to disclose potential conflicts of interest, quotes Econ4’s George DeMartino and Gerald Epstein, leading advocates of uploading ethics into the profession.

George DeMartino, a University of Denver professor who headed the panel, has argued for the adoption of an even broader “economists’ oath” that would address questions like the ethics of advising dictators and the responsibility of economists to stand up for the poor.

Gerald Epstein, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has previously criticized economists’ lack of disclosure, in an email called the policy “a very big step forward.” He said the call for disclosure in nonacademic work, though nonbinding was particularly important because it will help “set norms of behavior that colleagues, the press, students and citizens can help hold economists accountable to.”

Read the story here.

Economics 4 People

From the Valley Advocate of Northampton, Mass.:

Popular economics education? The phrase seems oxymoronic. What field is more institutionalized and less popularized than economics?

Yet here is Econ4, a new initiative floating around the outskirts of economic academia, aiming to “end intellectual monoculture in the economics profession.”

Why are they doing this? And just what do they hope to accomplish?

“In the wake of the financial crisis, there was a need and demand for a better understanding of economics, more rooted in reality,” James Boyce tells me as we talk in his office. “You can’t delegate this stuff to the high priests of academia, Wall Street, and the Treasury Department.”

Read more here.

Econ4 in Chronicle of Higher Ed

Recently critics have mounted a more fundamental line of attack on mainstream economists, taking aim at the ideology that has grown dominant over the past 30 years, which they say played a significant part in causing the Great Recession and not doing much to help solve it.

Read the entire piece here.

Economics 4 People, the Planet, and the Future

From James Boyce’s post on the TripleCrisis blog:

Our current economic crisis is not only a crisis of the economy. It is also a crisis of economics. The free-market fundamentalism of the closing decades of the 20^th century today has been thoroughly discredited – or at least, should have been – by financial collapse, swelling inequality, global imbalances, mass unemployment, and environmental degradation.

Read the rest of the article here.

Nancy Folbre: Occupy Economics

From Nancy Folbre’s NYT Economix post, Occupy Economics:

The Occupy Wall Street movement, displaced from some key geographic locations, now enjoys a small but significant encampment among economists.

Concerns about the impact of growing economic inequality fit neatly into a larger critique of mainstream economic theory and its deep faith in the efficiency of markets.

Read the rest of the article here.

Interview with Gerald Friedman