Occupy Economics Departments

Conventional economists have a lot to answer for but will they listen?

By David Morris

About David Morris

David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and director of its New Rules Project

We need to drop the pretense that economics is a science based on laws and objective models.

On November 2nd nearly 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy movement. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest. That’s regrettable since the economics profession has provided the intellectual framework and justification for the inequality and centralization of corporate power the Occupiers are challenging.

“You can’t get into so disastrous a situation as we are in now without extraordinarily bad thinking and the economics departments were the source of that bad thinking,” observes Steven Keen, Professor of Economics at the University of Western Sydney and author of Debunking Economics.