Songezo Zibi YOU WRITE: From this year, we have secured the rights to publish the great Paul Krugman’s writings for the New York Times. Many people disagree with him, of course, but the more ideas, the better. Too much orthodoxy is the heresy that will sink all of us into the abyss. The tension that arises from different opinions is necessary if we are to all stay on our toes and perform optimally. By most accounts, the NYT and Paul Krugman represent prevailing orthodoxy. Krugman, in particular, is an important thinker among mainstream Neo-Classical Economists. Regardless of the tensions that he represents, Stiglitz, too, is very much within the band of orthodoxy. Aside from our personal interactions and discussions, his standard textbooks insist, for instance, that all mainstream economists share the basic assumption of the competitive self-correcting model. I will, of course, never tell Business Day what to write or publish, (I am probably burning a bridge, with this) nor any other media outlet for that matter, but to suggest that Krugman represents heterodoxy or an alternative approach to political economy seems unfair to those of us who have promoted more pluralist approaches. The post-autistic economics, real economics, heterodoxy economics movements, and even the work of Veblen, Polanyi, Kalecki Jamie Galbraith, Tony Lawson of Cambridge and even Hayek - it is uncool to mention Marx, or Marxist political economists - present forms or heterodoxy. Incidentally, even among critiques of econometrix, the DSGE model (orthodoxy) is considered to be unstable and unreliable, but Krugman and others will onto their beliefs with religious fervour. Among some of my colleagues (in my personal life, not professional) there are quite forceful arguments, and substantive evidence that the dominance of the DSGE model, was, at least partially, to blame for the current crisis. I was mightily surprised and humbled when the Economics Department at UCT invited me to speak on the topic in October last year. Although most of them can, unproblematically be placed within the orthodoxy camp, they had the grace to listen, discuss, and acknowledge our (heterodoxy) approaches to political economy qua Economics. Issy
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 08:48:10 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015