Neoclassical economists are so isolated from the real world, they are essentially autistic?
<<< The orthodoxy also distorts economic reality, say its critics. "Superficially, it seems like a coherent model of the world," says Mr. Keen, the author of Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. But don't be fooled, he says, by the mainstream's fancy mathematics and claims that it is a predictive science, not just a descriptive social science.
"I'd put its maturity at the same level as physics before Newton," he scoffs. "And possibly before Galileo."
Many approaches to economics fall under the heterodox umbrella. Besides Marxist economics, they include so-called Austrian economics, which disputes the neoclassical truism that economies tend toward equilibrium; post-Keynesian economics, which highlights the role of uncertainty in economies; complexity theory, which uses such concepts as chaos theory to model economies; the intersections of economics and such realms as feminism, environmentalism, and the law; and evolutionary theory, which views economies as akin to evolving biological systems. The neglect of the last particularly appalls Mr. Bernstein, who calls one of its founders, Thorstein Veblen, "probably the most truly original thinker that the U.S. has produced."
The dissidents take heart from events in France. In 2000, an online graduate-student petition proclaimed that neoclassical economics, or at least its unbridled application in teaching and research, dwelt in unreality to the point of being "autistic."
The students dubbed their movement "Post-Autistic Economics" and quickly provoked a national debate of the French variety. Some leading publications and high-profile economists hailed the protesters, who, in petitions-cum-manifestoes, denounced economics as a morass of "imaginary worlds" that was mired in "pathological," pseudoscientific mathematics; that was aggressively excluding pluralism; >>>
chronicle.com
Post-Autistic Economics Network
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