有人注意到這個<後自閉經濟學運動>嗎？ - 經濟

以法國高師、英國劍橋、美國哈佛芝加哥大學的經濟系學生為開端
幾年前開始了一場經濟學改革運動(網站名之為<後自閉經濟學網絡>)
對經濟學在教學與理論基礎上的各種問題提出了許多批評與建議
許多問題直指美國為主的主流新古典經濟學

他們指出的許多當前經濟學的弊病
在台灣也是存在的
以下轉錄一篇報導供大家參考
希望能幫助對經濟學多一點反思

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Post-Autistic Economics


By Deborah Campbell


The university-aged children of France’s ruling class ought to have been
contentedly biding their time. They were, after all, destined to move into
the high-powered positions reserved for graduates of the elite
Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS). “The ENS is for the very good students,
and the very good students aren’t afraid to ask questions,” says Sorbonne
economist Bernard Geurrien.

Their revolutionary arguments created an earthquake in the French media,
beginning with a report in Le Monde that sent a chill through the academic
establishment. Several prominent economists voiced support and a
professors’ petition followed. The French government, no doubt recalling
the revolutionary moment of May 1968, when students led a 10-day general
strike that rocked the republic to its foundations, promptly set up a special
commission to investigate. It was headed by leading economist Jean-Paul
Fitoussi, who also traveled to Madrid to address Spain’s nascent
“post-autistic” student movement. Fitoussi’s findings: the rebels
had a cause. Most important to the PAE, Fitoussi agreed to propose new
courses oriented to “the big problems” being ignored by mainstream
economics: unemployment, the economy and the environment.

A backlash was inevitable. Several economists (notably the American
Robert Solow from MIT), launched a return volley. What followed was an
attempt to discredit the PAE by implying that the students were
anti-intellectuals opposed to the “scientificity” of neoclassical economics.
The accusations didn’t stick: the dissenters were top students who had
done the math and found it didn’t add up.

Gilles Raveaud, a key PAE student leader along with Emmanuelle Benicourt
and Iona Marinescu, sees today’s faith in neoclassical economics as
“an intellectual game” that, like Marxism and the Bible, purports to
explain everything, rather than admitting there are many issues it hasn’t
figured out. “We’ve lost religion,” says Raveaud, “so we’ve got
something else to give meaning to our lives.”

One of the attractions of the math-centric curriculum is that it is easy
to teach, says Raveaud: “It leaves you plenty of time for research.”
According to Bernard Guerrien, who teaches both mathematics and
microeconomics at the Sorbonne, “I can guarantee that teaching math
demands the least amount of work. To touch on reality, however, that’s
difficult.”

Raveaud believes that the status quo has far-reaching implications for
society. “I think neoclassical theory in particular and economics in
general have managed to get into people’s minds to limit the domain of
possibilities for political action,” he says. “Some people would say
this is unjust; we’ve got to resist. But it’s not only that it’s unjust.
It’s false.”

Fellow PAE leader Emmanuelle Benicourt described his hope for PAE as
follows: “We hope it will trigger concrete transformations of the way
economics is taught.... We believe that understanding real-world economic
phenomena is enormously important to the future well-being of humankind,
but that the current narrow, antiquated and naive approaches to economics
and economics teaching make this understanding impossible. We therefore
hold it to be extremely important, both ethically and economically, that
reforms like the ones we have proposed are, in the years to come, carried
through, not just in France, but throughout the world.”

In 2004, their ideas took hold. As Guerrien explains, greater pluralism
has come to the Sorbonne. “At our university (the leading one for
economics in France) we have succeeded in cutting back the programs of
micro, macro and mathematics, something that would have been inconceivable
a few years ago. This is in the service of an approach more open, more
multidisciplinary. The ‘orthodox’ have rather easily given way, having,
despite everything, internalized the arguments advanced against them.
In the colloquiums and in the press they have felt obliged to justify what
they do, thereby admitting at least in part the aptness of the ‘anti
autistic’ criticisms.”

United Kingdom

Raveaud and Marinescu, key French PAE student leaders, visited the
Cambridge Workshop on Realism and Economics in the UK in spring of 2001.
“It must have been the right time,” says Phil Faulkner, a Ph.D. student
at Cambridge University. That June he and 26 other disgruntled Ph.D.
students issued their own reform manifesto, called “Opening Up Economics,”
that soon attracted 750 signatures. Economics students at Oxford University,
who had attended the same workshop, followed with their own
“post-autistic” manifesto and website. Similar groups linked to heterodox
(as opposed to orthodox) economics began emerging elsewhere in Europe and
South America.

The Cambridge rebellion “was prompted by frustration,” says Faulkner,
but they hadn’t expected such a positive reception from fellow students.
“If anyone were to be happy about the way economics had gone, we’d expect
it to be Ph.D. students, because if they were unhappy with it, they simply
wouldn’t be here. In fact, that wasn’t the case.”

The foundations for the Cambridge manifesto were laid down by Professor
Tony Lawson, a Cambridge mathematician turned theoretical economist who
had established the Cambridge Workshop in 1990 as a space for critical
debate of real-world economic issues. “The real problem in economics is
dogmatism: nothing else is allowed,” says Lawson, author of Reorienting
Economics and Economics and Reality. “In economics there are a lot of
different approaches, but pick up a textbook and you won’t find any of
them mentioned.”

Lawson calls the hegemony of neoclassical views within academia a
“closed game”: “Promotion is the goal, advancement of career, Nobel prizes,
fellowships at scientific academies. They promote each other and they
make up the boards. It’s a self-perpetuating system.”

As a mathematician, Lawson says he is driven by a love of mathematics and
concern over seeing it abused. “I imagine it would be like a violinist
seeing a violin used as a drumstick. It’s not reason to keep the violin
out of the orchestra, but it’s not a drumstick.” He adds, “I don’t want
to stop people using mathematical models, I just want to stop them from
stopping everyone doing anything else.”

As expected, Cambridge ignored the doctoral students’ petition. Their
efforts, Faulkner explains, were primarily intended to show support for
the French students and to use their privileged position at the esteemed
economics department to demonstrate to the rest of the world their discontent.
Some of the signatories worried that speaking out could have dire
consequences, and the original letter was unsigned. “I think it’s
more future possibilities, getting jobs, etc., that [made them think] it
might not be smart to be associated with this stuff,” says Faulkner.
He says he already knew that his research interests meant he would have
to work outside of the mainstream: “There was nothing to lose really.”

Edward Fullbrook, a research fellow at the University of the West of England,
had already launched the first post-autistic econonmics newsletter in
September 2000. Inspired by the French student revolt and outraged by
stories emerging from American campuses that courses on the history of
economic thought were being eradicated (which he viewed as an effort to
facilitate complete indoctrination of students), Fullbrook battled hate
mail and virus attacks to get the newsletter off the ground. Soon,
prominent economists such as James K. Galbraith stepped up to offer
encouragement and hard copy. The subscriber list ballooned from several
dozen to 7,500 around the world.

Fullbrook edited The Crisis in Economics, a book based on PAE contributions
that is now being translated into Chinese, and more recently
A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics. He notes that textbook publishers,
always hunting for the next big thing, have been inquiring about
PAE textbooks. It makes sense, says Fullbrook, since enrollments in
standard economics classes have been dropping, cutting into textbook
revenues. In other words, students just aren’t buying it. Ironically,
says Fullbrook,“Market forces are working against neoclassical economics.”

One of his contributors is Australian economist Steve Keen, an associate
professor of economics at the University of Western Sydney and the author of
Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. In 1973,
Keen led a student rebellion that resulted in the formation of the political
economy department at Sydney University. “Neoclassical economics has
become a religion,” says Keen. “Because it has a mathematical veneer,
and I emphasize the word veneer, they actually believe it’s true. Once
you believe something is true, you’re locked into its way of thinking
unless there’s something that can break in from the outside and destroy
that confidence.”

Despite the student revolt, the neoclassical model still reigns supreme at
Cambridge. Phil Faulkner now teaches at a university college, but is
limited to mainstream economics, the only game in town. “If you’re into
math, it’s a fun thing to do,” he says. “It’s little problems,
little puzzles, so it’s an enjoyable occupation. But I don’t think it’s
insightful. I don’t think it tells these kids about the things it
claims to describe, markets or individuals.”

United States

Sitting in an overcrowded cafe near Harvard Square, talking over the din of
full-volume Fleetwood Mac and espresso fueled chatter, Gabe Katsh describes
his disillusionment with economics teaching at Harvard University.
The red-haired 21-year-old makes it clear that not all of Harvard’s elite
student body, who pay close to $40,000 a year, are the “rationally”
self-interested beings that Harvard’s most influential economics course
pegs them as.

“I was disgusted with the way ideas were being presented in this class
and I saw it as hypocritical – given that Harvard values critical thinking
and the free marketplace of ideas – that they were then having this
course which was extremely doctrinaire,” says Katsh.
“It only presented one side of the story when there are obviously
others to be presented.”

For two decades, Harvard’s introductory economics class has been
dominated by one man: Martin Feldstein. It was a New York Times article on
Feldstein titled “Scholarly Mentor To Bush’s Team,” that lit the fire
under the Harvard activist. Calling the Bush economic team a
“Feldstein alumni club,” the article declared that he had “built an
empire of influence that is probably unmatched in his field.” Not only
that, but thousands of Harvard students “who have taken his, and only his,
economics class during their Harvard years have gone on to become
policy-makers and corporate executives,” the article noted. “I really
like it; I’ve been doing it for 18 years,” Feldstein told the Times.
“I think it changes the way they see the world.”

That’s exactly Katsh’s problem. As a freshman, he’d taken Ec 10,
Feldstein’s course. “I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that Ec 10
presents itself as politically neutral, presents itself as a science, but
really espouses a conservative political agenda and the ideas of this
professor, who is a former Reagan advisor, and who is unabashedly
Republican,” he says. “I don’t think I’m alone in wanting a class that
presents a balanced viewpoint and is not trying to cover up its
conservative political bias with economic jargon.”

In his first year at Harvard, Katsh joined a student campaign to bring a
living wage to Harvard support staff. Fellow students were sympathetic,
but many said they couldn’t support the campaign because, as they’d
learned in Ec 10, raising wages would increase unemployment and hurt those
it was designed to help. During a three-week sit-in at the Harvard
president’s office, students succeeded in raising workers’ wages,
though not to “living wage” standards.

After the living wage “victory,” Harvard activists from Students for a
Humane and Responsible Economics (SHARE) decided to stage an intervention.
This time, they went after the source, leafleting Ec 10 classes with
alternative readings. For a lecture on corporations, they handed out
articles on corporate fraud. For a free trade lecture, they dispensed
critiques of the WTO and IMF. Later, they issued a manifesto reminiscent of
the French post-autistic revolt, and petitioned for an alternative class.
Armed with 800 signatures, they appealed for a critical alternative to
Ec 10. Turned down flat, they succeeded in introducing the course outside
the economics department.

Their actions follow on the Kansas City Proposal, an open letter to economics
departments “in agreement with and in support of the
Post Autistic Economics Movement and the Cambridge Proposal” that was
signed by economics students and academics from 22 countries during a
conference in Kansas City.

Harvard President Lawrence Summers illustrates the kind of thinking that
emerges from neoclassical economics. Summers is the same former chief
economist of the World Bank who sparked international outrage after his
infamous memo advocating pollution trading was leaked in the early 1990s.
“Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE
migration of the dirty industries to the LDCS [Less Developed Countries]?”
the memo inquired. “I think the economic logic behind dumping a
load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should
face up to that.... I’ve always thought that under-populated countries
in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted....”

Brazil’s then-Secretary of the Environment, Jose Lutzenburger, replied:
“Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane.... Your
thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation,
reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of
many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we
live in.”

Summers later claimed the memo was intended ironically, while reports
suggested it was written by an aide. In any case, Summers devoted
his 2003/2004 prayer address at Harvard to a “moral” defense of
sweatshop labor, calling it the “best alternative” for workers in
low-wage countries.

“You can’t ignore the academic foundations for what’s going on in
politics,” says Jessie Marglin, a Harvard sophomore with SHARE.
SHARE didn’t want a liberal class with its own hegemony of ideas.
It wanted “a critical class in which you have all the perspectives
rather than just that of the right.” Without an academic basis for
criticism, other approaches “aren’t legitimized by the institution,”
she says. “It becomes their word versus Professor Feldstein, who is very
powerful.”

Harvard economics professor Stephen Marglin, Jessie’s father, teaches the
new course outside the Department. An Economics Department faculty
member since 1967, Marglin was the tail end of a generation formed by the
Great Depression and World War II. “This generation,” he says,
“believed that in some cases markets could be the solution, but that
markets could also be the problem.”

He considers that the Harvard economics department refused to sponsor
the new course because “they believe that economics is like physics,
it’s like a science [in that] there is a correct version and there is
no room for dispute about what the fundamentals are anymore than you
would countenance an alternative physics course.” It has often been
said that the field of economics suffers from “physics-envy” – the
desire to view itself as a hard science rather than the social science
that it actually is.

His new course still uses the Ec 10 textbook, but includes a critical
evaluation of the underlying assumptions. Marglin wants to provide balance,
rather than bias.

“I’m trying to provide ammunition for people to question what it is
about this economic [system] that makes them want to go out in the streets
to protest it,” he says. “I’m responding in part to what’s going on
and I think the post-autistic economics group is responding to that.
Economics doesn’t lead politics, it follows politics. Until there is a
broadening of the political spectrum beyond a protest in Seattle or a
protest in Washington, there will not be a broader economics.
People like me can plant a few seeds but those seeds won’t germinate
until the conditions are a lot more suitable.”

The revolution is spreading. A slogan emblazoned on a wall on a Madrid
campus, where the PAE movement has been making inroads, makes its case:
“!La economia es de gente, no de curvas!” –
“Economics is about people, not curves!”


*Deborah Campbell is the author of This Heated Place, a literary exploration
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and an associate editor at
Adbusters magazine. A version of this article has been translated for
inclusion in the Chinese edition of The Crisis in Economics and will appear
in a German book on economics.


資料來源：http://www.paecon.net/PAEarticles/SocialPolicy.htm


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