Academia is both a fountainhead and a battlefield of ideology, sometimes as a radical questioner and denouncer of the status quo, as it befits its mission to look for truth without "fear or favor", and at other times as an obsequious servant of the establishment, a powerful validator of accepted dogma. Besides having some natural audiences in their own students, and given the unquestionable authoritativeness of their voices, academics and leading intellectuals are in an exquisite position to hold forth on any subject they care to illuminate (or obscure) —pushing for conformity or rebellion according to personal character. Therein lies their power and the problem they present to the status quo—if they choose to oppose it. That their opinions count a great deal can be gleaned from the annals of history, from Galileo to our day, and reminders occur with distressing frequency.
Back in 1973, one of the first things that CIA-sponsored Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet did was to "intervene" the nation's universities (at least those deemed by the regime to be festering grounds of subversivos and democratic action), and appoint army generals to serve as rectors and deans of a number of distinguished colleges. In the wake of such move, which lasted well into 1976, all the social science faculties—sociology, economics, history, philosophy, and the main school of journalism—were simply shut down, their staff jailed, exiled, or persecuted. With the unceremonious disbanding of the schools, the students were sent home, or, more precisely into limbo.
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff262/walterRehm/pinochetsaluting.jpg" />
Our man in Chile: Augusto Pinochet, Milton Friedman's best disciple.
Concurrent with these "politically hygienic" measures (as one of the regime's spokespeople so crisply called it), Pinochet brought in and soon imposed at bayonet point a "shock treatment model" for the Chilean economy, the free-market fundamentalist prescription preached by University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman and his acolytes, the infamous "Chicago Boys" directly tutored by one of Friedman's colleagues, Arnold Harberger. As many radical and even centrist economists around the world had repeatedly warned, the pain of the "shock" was mainly absorbed by the poorest sectors, who lost a significant portion of their hard-won income, practically all government subsidies (however meager, still significant in their case), and all rights and instruments of self-defense against the depredations of management, since all labor unions were banned and their leaders simply jailed or murdered. While the bourgeois media—led by the American press–wasted no time in writing and singing panegyrics to the new "Chilean miracle," thereby helping to whitewash the dictator's numerous crimes, the reality on the ground was far different, and Chile's economic wounds have never healed.
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff262/walterRehm/Friedrich_Hayek.jpg" />
Friedrich Von Hayek: Friedman's intellectual mentor.
Pinochet's move against the social sciences may have been characteristically brutal but it had logic behind it. As suggested earlier, the mainstream social sciences—especially sociology and economics—are critical for the ongoing legitimation of "bourgeois democracy"—itself something of an oxymoron (it's always far more bourgeois than democratic). With their main theorems presented as truths comparable in impartiality (and most importantly, inevitability) to the laws of nature, their postulates sell the public a vision of society calculated to bolster acceptance of a deeply undemocratic status quo favoring capitalist values and policies. In this way, they act as legitimators and apologists for the system, and not as free and independent inquirers of truth. So much for the basic approach they propound (about which more later), but this abdication of their duty to society is often magnified by the fact that, when they do engage in research, their tools and priorities are reserved for the advancement and discovery of notions of benefit to their masters—the business class in power—and perforce inimical or of only tangential benefit to the masses. Similar deformations of focus and priority are seen in all social institutions dominated by the capitalist class, especially the media, the ubiquitous harlot, whose programming choices and content reflect identical biases. [Has anyone noticed the proliferation of business and "financial" news programs on the commercial and even PBS side of television, all fixated on breathless, often boosterish, analyses of the perennial, largely incomprehensible Wall Street roller-coaster, a casino by any standard, and endless discussions of markets, bonds, stocks, and what not, in a nation where no more than 5% of the people actually have a net worth above $100,000 or real portfolios of any kind? If that is not rank capitalist cheerleading, what the heck is that all about?]
What's wrong with "neoclassical" economics?
The average person, including well educated people, can't begin to answer that question properly. One of the reasons—important, I'd say—is because they don't have a clue; mainstream departments of economics do not teach anything but orthodox views of the "dismal science" (so nicknamed in 1849 by conservative economist Thomas Carlyle on account of Malthus' grim predictions, and because the discipline dealt with scarcity, subsistence and "other dreary subjects"). Now, orthodox doesn't necessarily mean wrong. "Orthodox" astrophysics, biology, math, or chemistry, for example, are pretty much on the mark. Their theories align as much as human beings can ascertain with observable phenomena, which, incidentally, are far easier to study in these branches of science than in society, since the latter, being immensely complex and in perennial flux, can't be turned into a satisfactory model. But the chief obstacle is political. Natural and pure scientists have the luxury of pursuing facts with far more of an independent mind than their cousins in economics, anthropology or sociology, for example, for, as previously discussed, their findings and positions do not affect the fortunes of powerful sectors of society with a vested interest in a certain version of reality.
Consider the question of capitalism's "true makeup" for a moment, and how immensely rich and powerful individuals and groups, people who influence or control the destiny and careers of countless academics, journalists, politicians, and similar voices, and who have prospered or lived pretty well under capitalism, would react to the following propositions. How do you think they would choose?
I'm sure you can begin to see what's at stake here. If I publish a book on economics embracing as true all these propositions—which, incidentally, happen to be false—what do you think will happen to my career? Will I land juicy contracts with powerful publishers? Swift promotions to the top of my career? Sell a ton of books and maybe have my volume adopted as the pre-eminent text in all pertinent courses? Will "my books" reflecting "my research", which so conveniently happens to agree so snugly with the entrenched status quo, lead even to high government appointments and perhaps even a Nobel? If you think all of this is quite possible, you're quite right, you're catching on; in fact, it has happened more than a few times to people like Paul Samuelson, the main theologian of the profession (and onetime advisor to JFK), and Milton Friedman, another Nobel winner, and the closest equivalent to a latter-day Jesuit for free-market fundamentalism. They have been honored and regaled beyond measure. But now let's look at the other side of the coin. Would a person refuting such positions receive the same reception? Yes, indeed, to be precise by the year 10,566, when, by the Bible-thumpers' own reckoning, hell will finally freeze over. In fact, in many nations these days, he or she will be lucky just to keep her job or escape in one piece across the border before the police or the local death squads come to pay a visit. Hyperbole? Hardly. In 1976, Orlando Letelier, a distinguished economist and former minister in Dr. Salvador Allende's cabinet, overthrown by Pinochet, and an exile in the US, was assassinated in broad daylight, right on Washington's "embassy row"—blown apart by a car bomb placed under his vehicle by rightwing Cuban operatives working closely with a Chilean assassination squad sent expressly by Pinochet to rub out one of his most annoying critics. The deed was performed with probable foreknowledge and complicity of the CIA and other US intelligence services. This was all amply documented in several books, and even corroborated by the Church Committee hearings. It's, as they used say in the old journalism school, "incontrovertible fact." Just a few days before his murder, Letelier had published a scathing article in The Nation ("Economic Freedom's Awful Toll"), denouncing in eloquent terms the horrific social costs of the Friedmanian model.
Now, I'm not saying that Samuelson, Friedman, and their numerous progeny, were or are all sellouts and worthless cranks promoted only on the basis of their usefulness to the system and lacking entirely in moral integrity. It would be unfair and inaccurate to deny that there are some brains in that crowd. But even genius is not infallible. It's possible to be a true believer in your own theories, be fanatically wrong, so to speak, and still receive accolades from the system boosters because, well, you are useful to them. If nothing else, the system does take care of its own. Under most circumstances orthodoxy pays, and those who do the system's bidding—wittingly or unwittingly—stand to gain.
The need for rectification
All the more reason, therefore, to celebrate the appearance of brave books disputing and exposing this thick tegument of lies, omissions and willful distortions we have come to call "neoclassical economics." Mindful Economics [ME], by a young academic, Joel Magnuson, does that, and it does the job brilliantly and comprehensively. Not since the 1970s, when we saw the last crop of "Goliath slayers" in Hunt and Sherman's Economics—an introduction to traditional and radical views, and, of course, Marc Linder's Anti-Samuelson, had we seen an introductory text to economics so well organized, comprehensive, accessible, and conscientious in its unorthodox analysis of the subject as to merit an unqualified hurrah. For my money, Magnuson's volume easily outweighs the [still] more popular The Divine Right of Capital, by the estimable Marjorie Kelly, if for no other reason than the simple fact that Kelly, like many liberals, seeks to both condemn and exonerate capitalism at once, in her case by producing this fictive criminal beast she calls "corporate capitalism," which apparently (in the tradition, curiously, of libertarians, as well, who continue to be enamoured of the idyllic days of small business) has no historical or evolutionary linkages with standard capitalism! Where does Kelly and her like-minded tribe think "corporate capitalism" sprang from? A new type of phlogiston? Kelly also prefers to talk coyly about 'wealth discrimination"—which I regard as superfluous— instead of class-induced differentials, since class, in the Marxian sense, remains unsurpassed as an instrument to interpret history and society. In that manner, Kelly supposedly seeks to have her cake and eat it too, forgetting that the masses—should they adopt her analysis— would suffer from her deficient diagnosis and inability to sever all ties with a system that has proved its incurable toxicity many times over. Magnuson, I'm happy to report, does not fall for that kind of temporizing.
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff262/walterRehm/Engelss56fe1.jpg" />
Friedrich Engels: A superb scholar in his own right, he directed Marx toward the study of economics, and produced some of the earliest classics in the literature of political sociology, basing his writing on firsthand experience of the conditions of life of the English working class which he witnessed in Manchester.
It is said that Engels was once asked by an American reporter how he'd go about fixing or "transcending" capitalism, should he ever have the opportunity to attempt such a feat. The story may be apocryphal, but I can't resist telling it because it is so apt. The journalist was expecting a detailed roadmap to socialist eden, from indubitably one of the great social visionaries of all time. He was surprised to hear Engels merely say, after a brief moment of reflection, "Upend it." In general, the "distilled wisdom" of the system is poison to the masses, so start by reversing it. If it says do this, do the opposite. You'll be on safe grounds. Well, Joel Magnuson's book seems to follow the same advice. While presenting all the essential topics that students and the public at large might expect from an overview of economics, he "upends" the mainstream approach, while adding to it, and thereby turns a misleading, unnecessarily abstruse, and largely sterile brew into an enlightening journey of new appreciation for the untapped potential of humankind. In that sense, ME is a demystifying tool, a mind detoxifier that also makes economics fun to read. And Mindful Economics helps the reader vaccinate the mind against the blandishments of false consciousness, showing that, in economics, at least, the unorthodox view may be far closer to the truth.
Disentangling our minds from the official maze
Back in 1973, one of the first things that CIA-sponsored Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet did was to "intervene" the nation's universities (at least those deemed by the regime to be festering grounds of subversivos and democratic action), and appoint army generals to serve as rectors and deans of a number of distinguished colleges. In the wake of such move, which lasted well into 1976, all the social science faculties—sociology, economics, history, philosophy, and the main school of journalism—were simply shut down, their staff jailed, exiled, or persecuted. With the unceremonious disbanding of the schools, the students were sent home, or, more precisely into limbo.
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff262/walterRehm/pinochetsaluting.jpg" />Our man in Chile: Augusto Pinochet, Milton Friedman's best disciple.
Concurrent with these "politically hygienic" measures (as one of the regime's spokespeople so crisply called it), Pinochet brought in and soon imposed at bayonet point a "shock treatment model" for the Chilean economy, the free-market fundamentalist prescription preached by University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman and his acolytes, the infamous "Chicago Boys" directly tutored by one of Friedman's colleagues, Arnold Harberger. As many radical and even centrist economists around the world had repeatedly warned, the pain of the "shock" was mainly absorbed by the poorest sectors, who lost a significant portion of their hard-won income, practically all government subsidies (however meager, still significant in their case), and all rights and instruments of self-defense against the depredations of management, since all labor unions were banned and their leaders simply jailed or murdered. While the bourgeois media—led by the American press–wasted no time in writing and singing panegyrics to the new "Chilean miracle," thereby helping to whitewash the dictator's numerous crimes, the reality on the ground was far different, and Chile's economic wounds have never healed.
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff262/walterRehm/Friedrich_Hayek.jpg" />Friedrich Von Hayek: Friedman's intellectual mentor.
Pinochet's move against the social sciences may have been characteristically brutal but it had logic behind it. As suggested earlier, the mainstream social sciences—especially sociology and economics—are critical for the ongoing legitimation of "bourgeois democracy"—itself something of an oxymoron (it's always far more bourgeois than democratic). With their main theorems presented as truths comparable in impartiality (and most importantly, inevitability) to the laws of nature, their postulates sell the public a vision of society calculated to bolster acceptance of a deeply undemocratic status quo favoring capitalist values and policies. In this way, they act as legitimators and apologists for the system, and not as free and independent inquirers of truth. So much for the basic approach they propound (about which more later), but this abdication of their duty to society is often magnified by the fact that, when they do engage in research, their tools and priorities are reserved for the advancement and discovery of notions of benefit to their masters—the business class in power—and perforce inimical or of only tangential benefit to the masses. Similar deformations of focus and priority are seen in all social institutions dominated by the capitalist class, especially the media, the ubiquitous harlot, whose programming choices and content reflect identical biases. [Has anyone noticed the proliferation of business and "financial" news programs on the commercial and even PBS side of television, all fixated on breathless, often boosterish, analyses of the perennial, largely incomprehensible Wall Street roller-coaster, a casino by any standard, and endless discussions of markets, bonds, stocks, and what not, in a nation where no more than 5% of the people actually have a net worth above $100,000 or real portfolios of any kind? If that is not rank capitalist cheerleading, what the heck is that all about?]
What's wrong with "neoclassical" economics?
The average person, including well educated people, can't begin to answer that question properly. One of the reasons—important, I'd say—is because they don't have a clue; mainstream departments of economics do not teach anything but orthodox views of the "dismal science" (so nicknamed in 1849 by conservative economist Thomas Carlyle on account of Malthus' grim predictions, and because the discipline dealt with scarcity, subsistence and "other dreary subjects"). Now, orthodox doesn't necessarily mean wrong. "Orthodox" astrophysics, biology, math, or chemistry, for example, are pretty much on the mark. Their theories align as much as human beings can ascertain with observable phenomena, which, incidentally, are far easier to study in these branches of science than in society, since the latter, being immensely complex and in perennial flux, can't be turned into a satisfactory model. But the chief obstacle is political. Natural and pure scientists have the luxury of pursuing facts with far more of an independent mind than their cousins in economics, anthropology or sociology, for example, for, as previously discussed, their findings and positions do not affect the fortunes of powerful sectors of society with a vested interest in a certain version of reality.
Consider the question of capitalism's "true makeup" for a moment, and how immensely rich and powerful individuals and groups, people who influence or control the destiny and careers of countless academics, journalists, politicians, and similar voices, and who have prospered or lived pretty well under capitalism, would react to the following propositions. How do you think they would choose?
• If capitalism flows from human nature, then replacement is futile, dangerous and foolhardy.
• If capitalism and market freedom are guarantors of democracy, then replacing it is tempting tyranny.
• We have reached the end of history —of ideology (read = the end of the class struggle) because after capitalism we can only look forward to more and better capitalism.
I'm sure you can begin to see what's at stake here. If I publish a book on economics embracing as true all these propositions—which, incidentally, happen to be false—what do you think will happen to my career? Will I land juicy contracts with powerful publishers? Swift promotions to the top of my career? Sell a ton of books and maybe have my volume adopted as the pre-eminent text in all pertinent courses? Will "my books" reflecting "my research", which so conveniently happens to agree so snugly with the entrenched status quo, lead even to high government appointments and perhaps even a Nobel? If you think all of this is quite possible, you're quite right, you're catching on; in fact, it has happened more than a few times to people like Paul Samuelson, the main theologian of the profession (and onetime advisor to JFK), and Milton Friedman, another Nobel winner, and the closest equivalent to a latter-day Jesuit for free-market fundamentalism. They have been honored and regaled beyond measure. But now let's look at the other side of the coin. Would a person refuting such positions receive the same reception? Yes, indeed, to be precise by the year 10,566, when, by the Bible-thumpers' own reckoning, hell will finally freeze over. In fact, in many nations these days, he or she will be lucky just to keep her job or escape in one piece across the border before the police or the local death squads come to pay a visit. Hyperbole? Hardly. In 1976, Orlando Letelier, a distinguished economist and former minister in Dr. Salvador Allende's cabinet, overthrown by Pinochet, and an exile in the US, was assassinated in broad daylight, right on Washington's "embassy row"—blown apart by a car bomb placed under his vehicle by rightwing Cuban operatives working closely with a Chilean assassination squad sent expressly by Pinochet to rub out one of his most annoying critics. The deed was performed with probable foreknowledge and complicity of the CIA and other US intelligence services. This was all amply documented in several books, and even corroborated by the Church Committee hearings. It's, as they used say in the old journalism school, "incontrovertible fact." Just a few days before his murder, Letelier had published a scathing article in The Nation ("Economic Freedom's Awful Toll"), denouncing in eloquent terms the horrific social costs of the Friedmanian model.
Now, I'm not saying that Samuelson, Friedman, and their numerous progeny, were or are all sellouts and worthless cranks promoted only on the basis of their usefulness to the system and lacking entirely in moral integrity. It would be unfair and inaccurate to deny that there are some brains in that crowd. But even genius is not infallible. It's possible to be a true believer in your own theories, be fanatically wrong, so to speak, and still receive accolades from the system boosters because, well, you are useful to them. If nothing else, the system does take care of its own. Under most circumstances orthodoxy pays, and those who do the system's bidding—wittingly or unwittingly—stand to gain.
The need for rectification
All the more reason, therefore, to celebrate the appearance of brave books disputing and exposing this thick tegument of lies, omissions and willful distortions we have come to call "neoclassical economics." Mindful Economics [ME], by a young academic, Joel Magnuson, does that, and it does the job brilliantly and comprehensively. Not since the 1970s, when we saw the last crop of "Goliath slayers" in Hunt and Sherman's Economics—an introduction to traditional and radical views, and, of course, Marc Linder's Anti-Samuelson, had we seen an introductory text to economics so well organized, comprehensive, accessible, and conscientious in its unorthodox analysis of the subject as to merit an unqualified hurrah. For my money, Magnuson's volume easily outweighs the [still] more popular The Divine Right of Capital, by the estimable Marjorie Kelly, if for no other reason than the simple fact that Kelly, like many liberals, seeks to both condemn and exonerate capitalism at once, in her case by producing this fictive criminal beast she calls "corporate capitalism," which apparently (in the tradition, curiously, of libertarians, as well, who continue to be enamoured of the idyllic days of small business) has no historical or evolutionary linkages with standard capitalism! Where does Kelly and her like-minded tribe think "corporate capitalism" sprang from? A new type of phlogiston? Kelly also prefers to talk coyly about 'wealth discrimination"—which I regard as superfluous— instead of class-induced differentials, since class, in the Marxian sense, remains unsurpassed as an instrument to interpret history and society. In that manner, Kelly supposedly seeks to have her cake and eat it too, forgetting that the masses—should they adopt her analysis— would suffer from her deficient diagnosis and inability to sever all ties with a system that has proved its incurable toxicity many times over. Magnuson, I'm happy to report, does not fall for that kind of temporizing.
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff262/walterRehm/Engelss56fe1.jpg" />Friedrich Engels: A superb scholar in his own right, he directed Marx toward the study of economics, and produced some of the earliest classics in the literature of political sociology, basing his writing on firsthand experience of the conditions of life of the English working class which he witnessed in Manchester.
It is said that Engels was once asked by an American reporter how he'd go about fixing or "transcending" capitalism, should he ever have the opportunity to attempt such a feat. The story may be apocryphal, but I can't resist telling it because it is so apt. The journalist was expecting a detailed roadmap to socialist eden, from indubitably one of the great social visionaries of all time. He was surprised to hear Engels merely say, after a brief moment of reflection, "Upend it." In general, the "distilled wisdom" of the system is poison to the masses, so start by reversing it. If it says do this, do the opposite. You'll be on safe grounds. Well, Joel Magnuson's book seems to follow the same advice. While presenting all the essential topics that students and the public at large might expect from an overview of economics, he "upends" the mainstream approach, while adding to it, and thereby turns a misleading, unnecessarily abstruse, and largely sterile brew into an enlightening journey of new appreciation for the untapped potential of humankind. In that sense, ME is a demystifying tool, a mind detoxifier that also makes economics fun to read. And Mindful Economics helps the reader vaccinate the mind against the blandishments of false consciousness, showing that, in economics, at least, the unorthodox view may be far closer to the truth.
Disentangling our minds from the official maze
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