At 09:36 AM 11/16/98 -0800, Tom Walker wrote:
>I don't agree with everything Jay has to say about economists, but I can see
>his point. Just about every evil that has been perpetrated in the world
>during our lives has been justified by "economics" (on both sides of the
>former iron curtain). What this use of economics as a political blank check
>for the high and mighty has to do with the economists' profession is a
>rather complex question. Where I would disagree with Jay is in his premise
>that economics and economists are the source of the problem.
>
>By and large the great institutions that confer credentials, honours and
>career paths on economists have succumbed to the obsequious waltz by which a
>particular current of economic thought and a corresponding current of
>political tyranny mutually flatter each other. But no economic school of
>thought could have orchestrated the obsequity. It's more a matter of funding
>and career opportunities, specializations and an institutional hierarchy
>that always feels compelled to put a "moral" face on its crass pursuits.
>
>In simple terms, it is not the best economists who rise to the top, but the
>most ambitious. This is hardly a feature unique to economists or economics.
>The Greek tragedians had a word for it -- hubris. For a more modern term, we
>might turn sociologist C. Wright Mills' phrase, "professional ideology of
>the social pathologists" on its head: a social pathology of the professional
>ideologists.
>
I think the following passage from Chomsky explains how the economics
business works and what Jay means:
"The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may
be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the
media as well. And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of
Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic.
It’s dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support,
such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government
(which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely
distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the
middle of. People within them, who don’t adjust to that structure, who
don’t accept it and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless
you internalize it, and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to
be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up.
There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a
pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been
through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to
rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a
troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with
people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of
belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The
elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale
colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go
through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching
manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the
right thoughts, and so on.
"If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm which he wrote in the
mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It
was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to
Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later. Someone
had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about
"Literary Censorship in England" and what it says is that obviously this
book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and its totalitarian structure. But he
said England is not all that different. We don’t have the KGB on our neck,
but the end result comes out pretty much the same. People who have
independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.
"He talks a little, only two sentences, about the institutional structure.
He asks, why does this happen? Well, one, because the press is owned by
wealthy people who only want certain things to reach the public. The other
thing he says is that when you go through the elite education system, when
you go through the proper schools in Oxford, you learn that there are
certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that
are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite
institutions and if you don’t adapt to that, you’re usually out. Those two
sentences more or less tell the story.
"When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis
or somebody else is writing, they get very angry. They say, quite
correctly, "nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like.
All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m
never under any pressure." Which is completely true, but the point is that
they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has
to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If
they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the
wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where
they can now say anything they like. The same is mostly true of university
faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They have been through the
socialization system."
-----end of quote-------
An acquaintance of mine who majored in econ at LSU told me that Herman
Daly, who was was on the faculty there during that time, was virtually
isolated and shunned by his economics collegues. They knew on which side
their bread was buttered and refused to even entertain his ideas. He was an
embarassment to them because he wasn't mainstream. Somehow the university
system failed to filter him out before he got his PhD, tenure, and wrote
*Steady-State Economics*. Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen died in the early '90s a
bitter man because no one in the economics world took him seriously. The
fact of the matter is that the mainstream economics world *couldn't* take
him seriously because his observations undermined their profession. His
book *The Entropy Law and the Economic Process* is a blockbuster, BTW. Not
for the faint of heart.
As a result, mainstream economics is in the position of the Ptolemaic
astronomer confronted by the apparent misbehaviour of the Solar System. The
Roman Church had set out the geocentric position as doctrinal, hence its
power and prestige depended upon its truthfulness. The only solution within
the paradigm was to pile on more epicycles, because reevaluating the data
in another light was not only unremunerative (astronomers had to make a
living, too) but virtually unthinkable, due to the medieval scholastic
university filtering system.
Some things just don't change.
Regards,
Tom
______________________________________________________________________
Tom Lowe The tygers of wrath are wiser than
Jackson, Mississippi the horses of instruction.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - William Blake
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