Following are some excerpts - which speak for
themselves - from just three publications:
From: "More Heat than Light" by Philip
Mirowski; Cambridge University Press; ISBN 0 521 42689 8:
"Adopting proto-energetics set those
economists off on a course of inquiry that they themselves little understood,
one that continues to constrain their activities down to the present day. And
the worst part of it was that their own physics envy effectively prevented them
from seeing over the walls of their own self-constructed
labyrinth"
"... neoclassicals have avoided this
extension and its attendant evaluation whenever possible. Instead, they have
gone out of their way to concoct jerry-built scenarios of dynamic movements
between static equilibria identified by the primitive physics model. Jevons
invented a black box, called a 'trading body,' which magically performed all the
dynamic functions of coordination in an unspecified manner. Walras posited his
famous auctioneer, who prevented all trading activity while potential
transactors resorted to hypothetical questions about their utility fields.
Others attempted pseudodynamics predicated upon the difference between demand
and supply functions, piling one Rube Goldberg contraption atop
another."
"Once one gets the scorecard straight, then
it will become apparent that twentieth-century neoclassical theory resembles
nothing so much as the childs game of Mr. Potatohead - the fun comes in mixing
and matching components with little or no concern for the coherence of the final
profile."
"The reason that neoclassical economists
have proved incapable of seriously confronting these facts is that they would
then have to face up to the futility of their entire research
program."
"The reason their project has been so
conspicuously lacking success over the course of a century has been that each
successive capital theorist pretends to start anew, thoroughly oblivious to the
fact that there have existed at least seven distinctly different definitions of
production within the neoclassical paradigm (eight if you count Pareto, but no
one does), and because those determined to forget history are destined to repeat
it, the result is some Frankensteins monster of stitched-together
discards."
"For neoclassical economics, mandates 1
through 5 have many layers, rather like an English trifle. The frothy coverings
are in the ingenuous repudiations of scientism with which we began this chapter.
The next layer, of crumbled spongecake, is the problem that the concept of
energy has fragmented and dissolved in the overall scheme of the evolution of
twentieth-century physics, and therefore any attempt to update the
utility/energy metaphor would dictate a rather distasteful parallel
disintegration of the utility concept. As if the confection were not already
repulsive enough, further down in the dish one discovers an odd assortment of
hard and sticky sweet fruits of the fragmentation of twentieth-century physics,
each in its own inimitable manner calculated to ruin the appetite of any
neoclassical economist. Thermodynamics, general relativity, quantum mechanics,
subatomic theory, chaos theory - wherever one turns, one is confronted with an
unsavoury and repugnant sludge. Swallowing our bile, let us quickly tour the
contents of the bottom of the bowl."
From "Butterfly Economics" by Paul
Ormerod; faber and faber; ISBN 0 571 20041 9:
"Consumer markets such as those for
Christmas toys or films raise serious problems for conventional economic
theory."
"The butterfly emphasizes the
non-mechanistic nature of my thinking, yet, paradoxically, the ideas I advance
in the book demand the use of far more modern mathematics than is the case in
conventional economics, which remain fixated with the maths of
nineteenth-century engineers."
"For it implies that much of the control
which governments believe they exercise over the economy and society is
illusory."
"Despite this huge growth in government
activity, problems stubbornly remain. And the Law of Unintended Consequences
often applies to policy actions: their impact either turns out to be the
opposite of what is intended, or even if they succeed in their aims, there are
unforseen adverse consequences elsewhere."
"With a proper appreciation of how
economies and societies work, the role of government is reduced whilst,
paradoxically, its powers are increased."
"Economic forecasting and attempts to
control the economy by changes in taxation, public spending or interest rates
remain a key part of government activity in the developed world. But the control
which governments believe they have, in their ability both to make reasonably
accurate forecasts and to understand the consequences of policy changes designed
to alter the outcome is largely illusory. Chapter six shows why this is so, and
why the evidence is far more consistent with our complex world of interacting
agents than it is with the mechanical world of conventional
theory."
"The free market choses not the best, but
the worst."
"In short, in common with virtually every
country which has ever industrialised successfully, America did so with policies
which were in direct contradiction of the theorems of competitive markets and of
pure free trade. The Far Eastern economies are but the latest additions to this
list."
"The so-called discipline of psephology,
the study and prediction of voters behaviour, is one of the few which is able to
make economic forecasting look respectable."
"Marshalls (Principles of Economics)
detachment is remarkable. He wrote to a colleague, 'my only confident dogma in
economics is that every short statement on a broad issue is inherently
false'."
"Unfortunately for the theory, in 1982
David Newbury of Cambridge and Joseph Stiglitz of Princeton proved that in an
uncertain world in which the future is allowed to exist, the conclusion that the
distribution of income and wealth cannot be altered without harming someone is,
in general, not true. Despite this finding, the old result continues to be
taught to students the world over."
"But in his latest paper, published in the
prestigious Economic Journal in early 1998, Loomes concludes that the postulates
of conventional theory are fundamentally flawed. The quest, he writes, to model
individuals as if they are characterised by some set of fully formed and highly
articulated preferences, which they can and will apply consistently to any and
every form of decision problem, is doomed. Not just difficult:
doomed."
"Real scientists can land a spacecraft on
the moon, because they have a very good knowledge of where the rocket is going
and of what will happen if they adjust the controls. But economics lacks this
understanding... Yet this is exactly the situation in which conventional
economic modellers find themselves and, truly remarkably, politicians continue
to believe them"
"So full employment in the US and a
dramatic fall in unemployment in the UK have NOT led to increases in inflation.
Yet British and European economic policy remains dominated by the view that low
unemployment DOES automatically lead to higher inflation. great deal of
sophisticated mathematical, statistical work is done within the crabbed confines
of conventional economics to try to establish this result - without much
success, for very often no sooner has a rule been obtained than it is
contradicted by what happens next."
"Fear of inflation is really an urban myth
de nos jours."
"for those who want a short cut, at the end
of the chapter it is the RBC models which are swinging from the
gallows."
"The continued grip of these models on the
academic economic community is yet another illustration of Mark Twains remark
that the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction has to be
plausible."
"It is cynical but true to say that in the
academic world the theories that are most likely to attract a devoted following
are those that best allow a clever but not very original young man to
demonstrate his cleverness."
"The world of business has a much better
intuitive understanding of the complexity of the world than government does, and
certainly than most academic economists."
From the publication: "Austand oznews
by-passing foreign media cover-up" First Quarter, 1999; www.ozemail.com.au/~austand/oznews.htm:
"The treasury plan to keep our nation poor
and vulnerable to invasion. It controls the nation using two illegal
practices:
1. Unfair Competition: Tax revenue: $124.6 billion; Australians paid $114.7 billion; TNCs paid $9.9 billion (ABS Taxation Revenue: 5506.0 (1996-97) - they pay 'little or no tax' (ATO Canberra-Sydney Morning Herald, 28th October, 1996). This is a clear case of unfair competition - foreign competition to boot - and it is illegal.
2. Collusion: One of the many examples is the 'tax reform' (so-called) which went on for months and never mentioned the most important issue: why foreign enterprise is not paying tax. The only tax mentioned was GST, which will not collect TNCs taxes, suiting the Treasurys plan - a cover-up."
1. Unfair Competition: Tax revenue: $124.6 billion; Australians paid $114.7 billion; TNCs paid $9.9 billion (ABS Taxation Revenue: 5506.0 (1996-97) - they pay 'little or no tax' (ATO Canberra-Sydney Morning Herald, 28th October, 1996). This is a clear case of unfair competition - foreign competition to boot - and it is illegal.
2. Collusion: One of the many examples is the 'tax reform' (so-called) which went on for months and never mentioned the most important issue: why foreign enterprise is not paying tax. The only tax mentioned was GST, which will not collect TNCs taxes, suiting the Treasurys plan - a cover-up."
"They collude with foreign enterprise,
politicians, foreign-owned media, the ABC, and all the statutory authorities
which they control, robbing Australians of their democratic rights. They
colluded with all involved in the 1998 election, which should be declared null
and void."
"Australians have carried the full load of
tax, for generations. Since colonisation, the Treasury has used the code words
'bestowing naturalising status', to give tax and tariff holidays to foreign
enterprise. We can find no authority for this in Hansard. The Treasury obviously
knew they were on shaky ground, so formalised an arrangement, by the
introduction of the Double Taxation Agreement Bill in 1953, forcing us into debt
year after year, making the Australian people suffer
unnecessarily."
"There have never been sufficient funds
to maintain essential services. The Treasury colluded with the government
and foreign enterprise and introduced 'privatisation' - so-called, suiting the
Treasurys objective, keeping us in debt. Our essential services are now in
danger and without income from foreign enterprise tax, we will become inexorably
worse off."
"Our parliamentarians have always acted as
puppets taking orders from Treasury, even though it is simply a department of
the nation that should be serving us. They act as a representative for the
welfare of foreign enterprise, to the degree where we Australians have become
more colonial than we were in the days when we first stepped
ashore."
