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.
Tent City University
The U.K.’s “Tent City University” offers a short course in occupied economics:
http://tentcityuniversity.occupylsx.org/?page_id=172
Globalization of protest
From Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz:
The best government that money can buy is no longer good enough.
Read his piece here.
Video: America Beyond Capitalism
“If it can happen in Cleveland, it can happen anywhere.” Gar Alperovitz on an alternative to state socialism and corporate capitalism:
Source: The Real News Network.
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.
The High Price of Materialism
A new video from the Center for a New American Dream.
Source: http://www.newdream.org/resources/high-price-of-materialism
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 20th 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.
Wanted: Worldly Philosophers
Economists should see the big picture – and ask the big questions. But in a recent oped piece, Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman argue that the profession has been so preoccupied with the trees that it lost sight of the forest:
It’s become commonplace to criticize the ‘Occupy’ movement for failing to offer an alternative vision. But the thousands of activists in the streets of New York and London aren’t the only ones lacking perspective: economists, to whom we might expect to turn for such vision, have long since given up thinking in terms of economic systems — and we are all the worse for it.
Read their piece here.
The Prehistory of the Next Possible Progressive Era
Excellent stuff from Gar Alperovitz on laying groundwork for the movement to come. Read it here.
