My strong focus on economic matters this weekend is partly due to the current issue of AdBusters, "Thought Control in Economics". While some of the pieces are little more than comments, and could have been written decades ago, others help put together a picture of possibilities beyond the conventional thinking in economics, which still seems incapable of really coming to grips with the financial crisis we're still struggling to get out of. Journalist Deborah Campbell's piece The Post-Autistic Movement provides a brief, episodic history of this decade's emergence of an heterodox opposition to the model-obsessed market fundamentalist establishment, tracing developments that are clearly political as much as they are intellectual, from France to Britain and America.
Someone called the reigning neoclassical dogma "autistic!" The analogy would stick: like sufferers of autism, the field of economics was intelligent but obsessive, narrowly focused and cut off from the outside world.
(The Post-Autistic Economics Review--eventually renamed the realworld economics review--is up to issue 48. This is no mere passing fad.)
On the flip, I focus on two of pieces mentioned above that deal directly with the hegemonic stranglehold of conventional economics and its limitations. Another diary later today will focus on prosperity vs. growth.
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