Sharp in Greece

Why do graduate programs for Economics show so much favoritism, often times favoring an incoming undergrad with a background in Mathematics similar to the preferential treatment shown by parents who have a child with exceptional athletic ability while their other child is far from even being mentioned in the same sentence as the word athletic? Even the possibility of a student with greater experience in Mathematics than in Economics, i.e. Math major/Econ minor, has a better chance of being accepted than that of a student with simply their undergrad in Economics. Is it because education is the very spot where our government makes a crucial investment year after year? (FYI, I completely disagree with the large amount of recent budget cuts in academics during the current “recession”, especially in this country who was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children, but that is a topic worthy of its own entirely new blog post) How about since a number of administrators, faculty and professors from prestigious universities around the country work with or on our very own Council of Economic Advisers, does this imply that these are the wizards who dictate the standard for who’s in and who’s out? Could it be true that our current academic stairway to a job in the government/academia is stuck in a whirlpool and cyclical turbulent flow inseparable from any new way of thought?

Now back to my original thought on investment. What exactly is Uncle Sam getting in return for his wise investment towards the higher education of particularly, aspiring economists? BTW, word on the street is he’s getting a good rate! He gets whiz kids, our newest public policy makers fresh off being brainwashed by propagandists such as Harvard economics professors Greg Mankiw - who's textbook I had the privilege of being lectured from in my Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory course, - and Martin Feldstein. He also gets Milton Freidman neoclassicals who envision the “free market” as a completely self-regulating system controlled by the laws of the universe/the invisible hand, with no need for human interference. But wait his return keeps getting better! He will receive economists who talk of a “perfect market” – one that exhibits “perfect competition” between businesses and “perfect information” between businesses and consumers – lacking the slightest consideration for the role “animal spirits” play on the psychology of our economy and overlooking the fact that human nature is vulnerable to other forces, which cause people to make irrational choices. Of course this is a sound investment for Uncle Sam because he is getting the most bang for his buck, graduating mathematicians who will use models that are dry, stale and deficient of any human or environmental values to develop new policies insuring that the USA’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – a measure of overall economic activity – stays above the competition. YES! The whiz kid made us richer! Obama is happy, Ben Bernanke is happy, momma and daddy are happy, everyone is happy! Right? Wrong.

Unfortunately, I am already deciding to conform slightly. I am forced to accept the orthodox criteria that most Economic graduate programs require. My mind is set that I will graduate with my undergrad from Manchester College in Economics and Business Management with a minor in Mathematics (yeah, I’ll be a nerdy white guy by the time I’m finished but with the perspective of a nerdy black guy because those nerdy white guys tend to only have “book smarts” but lack any type of common sense when it comes to the ways of the world, mankind and especially music, i.e. “street smarts”). However, as bad as I am dissin’ the Mathematics prerequisite, a minor in this field will provide me with my meal ticket into the world of the opposition. If biting the bait and understanding the rules to their game is necessary to get my butt inside a classroom and spark POW-WOWs’/debates with the very leaders at the frontier of this mathematical modeling (professors), then so be it! It’ll be like my very own version of Inception. Planting a contagious heterodox – one that advances the economic vision of economists such as E.F. Schumacher who said, “Economics without Buddhism, i.e., without spiritual, human and ecological values, is like sex without love.” - inside a classroom that spreads to aspiring economists around campus, who like white blood cells begin to fight off what isn’t supposed to be there. Administrators will eventually decide it is time they diagnose their autistic – “intelligent but obsessive, narrowly focused and cut off from the outside world” - way of thinking. Speaking about our current financial crisis and referring to free market theory, Harvard economist Dani Rodrick said, “The problem wasn’t with the economics but with the economists. Theories and models are tools, but we have fixated on one of the possible hundreds of models and elevated that above the others.”

I guess you can go ahead, sit back and say yeah that’s been done before. Students attempting to start a revolution only to have their fire put out by academic economists who are like an ostrich with its head in the sand. And then these students get suckered back into the way of mainstream economic thinking because they’re scared shitless that if they stray too far from the dominant orthodox their chances of getting an academic job/job in the government are seriously reduced. However, all of those failed attempts to resurrect economics did not have any fuel to keep their fire going and what is necessary for a fire to keep burning? Wood! Or at least something that will burn slowly. This time around the revolutionaries have some fuel, that being the “Great Recession”, labeled by many economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Going on since 2007, our best hope is for the “Great Recession” to extend as long as possible or as needed (but hopefully not too long!). You see things in academia change at a very slowwwww pace. David Card, a leading labor economist at California, Berkeley said it best “If unemployment is still high three years from now, then you might see a paradigm shift, economists will have to say that the market isn’t supposed to work this way. But if the economy bounces back in a year, then they will be able to dismiss the financial crash as an anomaly that is unimportant to the larger theory.” But until this paradigm shift actual takes place, more students in economic departments must take risks, grow some balls, and kick over this bucket of neoclassical economics. I’m signing off by leaving all of you aspiring post-autistic economists who don’t know how to handle the weird looks and skeptics that come with a revolution, with a quote from one of my favorite rappers Jay-Z, “I love that because that’s what I’m supposed to be doing, whether it’s accepted by everybody or not. I’m supposed to be pushing that envelope and trying new things. And people are supposed to say, “Hov, you might have went too far”.

Your Favorite Blue Collar Visionaire,

John Sharp