Occupy Economics

Forgive me for my exasperation.

There are too many disparate efforts to rethink economics, conferences on this, and papers on that. I admire each and every one. I support whole heartedly any attempt to shake economics from its irrelevant torpor. But all this fractured effort is achieving nothing. It cannot succeed in the face of the depth of resistance in most university economics departments and the fear that academics seem to have of open action.

I can understand that many sympathetic academics may want to shun action, after all they have livelihoods at stake. But I ask: what is a career in economics worth if that economics is toxic? Those with the greatest stake in the subject are the students who have yet to choose which path to take. It is their action that needs to be facilitated and made secure.

For it is their open action that will change things.

Concerted open action.

I am saddened, for instance, that the recent emergence of protest in various universities in England – well done Manchester – does not immediately have connection with the legacy of the post autistic movement started in Paris many years ago. That legacy is alive in the form of the World Economic Association with its 12,000 members worldwide.

Then there is the Institute for New Economic Thinking with its illustrious patronage from George Soros.

And now there’s Rethinking Economics, a collaborative network of ‘rethinks’, who presumably will rethink economics. They appear to collaborate with those students at Manchester and elsewhere who go under the banner of The Post Crash Economics Society. Or at least I think they do.

Then there are the outposts of heterodox thought and centers of resistance like the Heterodox Newsletter produced out in Kansas.

There’s clearly a lot of energy. And a great deal of frustration with the status quo. But not enough actual tangible progress.

I very much fear that this energy will dissipate quickly – once again – when it comes into contact with the inertia of academia, and the entrenched patronizing complacency of orthodoxy.

Hence my exasperation.

So, in order to avoid disappointment, I call on all those who lead these groups to convene, to cooperate, to organize, and to act.

Together not apart.

Call each other. Support each other. Now.