March 29, 2024

Economix Blog: Nancy Folbre: Occupy Economics

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Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, displaced from some key geographic locations, now enjoys a small but significant encampment among economists.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

Concerns about the impact of growing economic inequality fit neatly into a larger critique of mainstream economic theory and its deep faith in the efficiency of markets.

Many unbelievers (including me) insist that we inhabit a global capitalist system rather than an efficient market. Willingness to use the C-word (capitalism) often signals concerns about a concentration of economic power that unfairly limits individual choices, undermines political democracy, generates financial and ecological crises and limits access to alternative economic ideas.

We can’t address these concerns effectively without a wider discussion of them.

Seventy Harvard students dramatized dissatisfaction with the economics profession when they walked out of Prof. Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics class on Nov. 2, protesting, in an open letter to their instructor, that the course “espouses a specific — and limited — view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.” (Professor Mankiw, a periodic contributor to the Economic View column in the Sunday Business section of The New York Times, discussed the protest in an interview with National Public Radio.)

The event prompted online discussion of conservative bias in introductory economics textbooks, including an anti-Mankiw blog set up by Daniel MacDonald, a graduate student in my own department. Prof. John Davis of the University of Amsterdam and Marquette University posted a video arguing that economic researchers, like fish, engage in herd behavior in order to minimize individual risk.

Similar themes were explored at the recent meetings of the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics, a forum for a remarkable variety of dissenting views deploying the C-word. I participated in a session discussing blogs maintained by David Ruccio of Notre Dame, Perry Mehrling of Barnard College, Tiago Mata of Duke University and Tim Wise of Tufts University, as well as an independent blogger, Peter Radford.

At the final plenary session of the conference, titled “Ethics and Economics,” participants discussed an “Economists’ Statement” in support of Occupy Wall Street that has been posted online at Econ4, a new site aimed at popular economics education. As of Nov. 27, the statement had gotten more than 220 signatures.

Populist anger — whether from the left or from the right — typically challenges conventional wisdom. In a startling opinion piece recently published in The Wall Street Journal, Sarah Palin urges the Occupy protesters to realize that Washington politicians have been “Occupying Wall Street” long before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.

Emphasizing government corruption, she declared that the Tea Party had always been opposed to “crony capitalism.” But is there a better kind of capitalism? If so, how can we move toward it? If not, what can we build in its place?

These are questions that both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street need to answer.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=33c4454ca7ca5565575124e39745bc57

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