G'day Michael,
>Among those praising the book are erstwhile Penner Henry Liu, URPE
>stalwart Don Goldstein and Hugh Stretton. Anybody know anything about >this? Rob?
You can get plenty from Keen's 'web extensions to Debunking Economics' site at:
http://bus.macarthur.uws.edu.au/Steve-Keen/de/Extensions/keen_word_to_html.html
And help yourself to a sample chapter at (just choose your subsections from
the left-hand column):
http://bus.macarthur.uws.edu.au/Steve-Keen/de/
I've actually only come across the bloke, who must live just two hours up the
road, in cyberspace (including, if memory serves, on the Jamie Galbraith
PEN-L/PKT seminar) and I thought him a bloody impressive communicator. He
reckons *Debunking* is for the non-technical reader, and he obviously works at
being accessible and interesting to newbies, as this blurb for his Economic
Thought course suggests:
_____________________________________________________________________
Why study Dead Economists?
The truth is that, if you have already studied any economics, you've already
implicitly studied dead economists--because the textbooks from which you
learnt microeconomics and macroeconomics were themselves
based on the work of dead (and living) economists.What you have done is taken
it on faith that the textbooks have accurately captured the theories
originally developed by other economists. If this faith is justified, then you
can simply learn economics from textbooks, and leave studying dead economists
to antiquarians who find that interesting for its own sake.
Unfortunately, this faith is misplaced: most economics textbooks have done
their history of economic thought very badly indeed. There are many reasons
for this--some of which are discussed below. But the end
result is that Mark Antony's funeral oration in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
could have been said over the body of any great economist, from Adam Smith to
John Maynard Keynes and beyond:
"The bad that men do lives on after them,
The good is 'oft interred with their bones".
Many of the most important insights of past economists have been forgotten or
poorly interpreted by their successors, while some of their greatest errors
continue uncorrected.
It gets worse. Most practising economists learnt their economics like you have
done, from textbooks. These books would have, for example, told them that
Keynes developed IS-LM analysis. In fact, Keynes did nothing of the sort:
IS-LM analysis was developed by John Hicks in 1936, in a review of Keynes''s'
General Theory. This wouldn't matter if IS-LM analysis accurately captured
what Keynes was on about, but it does not. In fact, John Hicks himself
realised this himself in 1980, and effectively repudiated IS-LM analysis. But
the textbooks continued to treat IS-LM
as the essence of Keynes's theory, and practising economists used this as the
basis of their theoretical developments, thus building their new economic
theories on unsound foundations.
For these reasons, you are far better off to study the history of economic
thought explicitly, by doing a subject like Economic Thought and Methodology.
Here you will read not just what a textbook said that Keynes said, but you
will also read exactly what Keynes did say. Frequently this will be
astoundingly different to the rendition of Keynes's (or Friedman's, or
Marx's) work given in the textbooks.
Why are economics textbooks so bad?
Economics is a subject which most students learn via textbooks. This is
something it shares in common with subjects like Maths, Physics, Chemistry and
so on, and from this perspective, it’s a perfectly sensible way to learn:
no-one would argue that to learn calculus properly, for example, you should
really read Newton’s Principia. But in other disciplines like English and
other language studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, History, and so on,
there is a
very good reason for arguing that students should read the original: no-one
could argue that reading a textbook about Julius Caesar was comparable to
reading Shakespeare's original.
Economics, then, follows a practice which is standard in the physical
sciences, but at odds with the social sciences. So is economics a physical
science? Hardly: though it has pretensions to being more scientific than, for
example, Sociology, it is still distinctly a social science.
Economic theories are not conceived in a vacuum: they are a product of the
time and place in which they were first developed, and there is as a result a
lot of Philosophy, Sociology, and Politics, bound up in economic thought. From
this perspective, there is good reason to study the evolution of economic
thought over time. Textbooks tend to omit
the social context in which economic theories are developed: for instance,
"Keynesian" economics tends to be taught as a means to control the level of
employment, when it in fact developed in the middle of the greatest economic
catastrophe ever to befall the Western world, the Great Depression; "Marxism"
tends to be judged on the basis of the failures of the Soviet Union, when the
chief architect of Marxism died 30 years before the Soviet Union came into existence.
Textbook courses in micro and macro-economics also tend to omit the often
strong political differences between different theories, instead implying that
each later economist has built on and extended the work of his/her
predecessors. Thus the "Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment"
(NAIRU) is portrayed as an elaboration of Phillips's original work on the
dynamics of unemployment in the 1950s. However NAIRU and Phillips's original
work represent quite different views of the economy: NAIRU argues that the
rate of unemployment can't be
influenced by economic policy, whereas Phillips developed the "Phillips curve"
to support his modelling of the way in which government controls could
stabilise an unstable economy.
You will therefore get a better grasp of micro and macro-economics by studying
the way in which these theories have developed over time.
Some of the other reasons to study Dead Economists include:
Keynes, Marx, Smith, etc., are superb authors whom you can read for
pleasure as well as for education. This course is taught using original works,
and they are far more readable than any textbook.
The course is fun.
