And Disband the Departments of The Walking Dead

In 1994 Paul Ormerod published a book called The Death of Economics. He argued economists don’t know what they’re talking about. In 2001 Steve Keen published a book called Debunking Economics: the naked emperor of the social sciences, with a second edition in 2011 subtitled The naked emperor dethroned?. Keen also argued economists don’t know what they’re talking about. (Davies 2015, 1)

Neither of these books, nor quite a few others, has had the desired effect. Mainstream economics has sailed serenely on its way, declaiming, advising, berating, sternly lecturing, deciding, teaching, pontificating. Meanwhile half of Europe and many regions and groups in the United States are in depression, and fascism is making a comeback. The last big depression spawned Hitler. This one is promoting Golden Dawn in Greece and similar extremist movements elsewhere. In the anglophone world a fundamentalist right-wing ideology is enforcing an increasingly narrow political correctness centred on “free” markets and the right of the rich to do and say whatever they like. “Freedom”, but only for some, and without responsibility. (Davies 2015, 1-2)

Evidently Ormerod and Keen were too subtle. It’s true their books also get a bit technical at times, especially Keen’s, but then they were addressing the profession, trying to bring it to its senses, to reform it from the inside. That seems to have been their other mistake. They produced example after example of how mainstream ideas fail, but still they had no effect. I think the message was addressed to the wrong audience, and was just too subtle. Economics is naked and dead, but never mind the stink, just prop up the corpse and carry on. (Davies 2015, 2)

Oh, but look! The corpse is moving. It’s getting up and walking. Time to call in John Quiggin, author of Zombie Economics: how dead ideas still walk among us. Perhaps he’ll show us how to shoot it in the head, or whatever it takes to finally stop a zombie. (Davies 2015, 2)

Well, I think it’s clear we can’t be too subtle. We need to speak in plain English, to everyone, and get straight to the point. Economists don’t know what they’re talking about. We should remove economists from positions of power and influence. Get them out of treasuries, central banks, media, universities, where ever they spread their baleful ignorance. (Davies 2015, 2)

Economists don’t know how businesses work, they don’t know how financial markets work, they can’t begin to do elementary accounting, they don’t know where money comes from nor how banks work, they think private debt has no effect on the economy, their favourite theory is a laughably irrelevant abstraction and they never learnt that mathematics on its own is not science. They ignore well-known evidence that clearly contradicts their theories. (Davies 2015, 2-3)

Other academics should look into this discipline called economics that lurks in their midst. Practitioners of proper academic rigour, like historians, ecologists, physicists, psychologists, systems scientists, engineers, even lawyers, will be shocked. Academic economics is an incoherent grab bag of mathematical abstraction, assertion, failure to heed observations, misrepresentation of history and sources, rationalisation of archaic money-lending practices, and wishful thinking. It missed the computational boat that liberated other fields from old analytical mathematics and overly-restrictive assumptions. It is ignorant of major fields of modern knowledge in biology, ecology, psychology, anthropology, physics and systems science. (Davies 2015, 3)

Though many economists themselves may not realise it, economics is an ideology rationalised by a dog’s breakfast of superficial arguments and defended by dense thickets of jargon and arcane mathematics. The ideology is an old one: the rich and powerful know best, the rest of us are here to serve them. (Davies 2015, 3)