And have we ever been since the time when the majority of us accepted the arguments of free-market ideologues who insisted on the near-magical power of "markets" to regulate human behavior for the greatest good? In the Chronicle Review, Harvard economist Stephen Marglin (pictured at right; hope he's got that scarf on today because it is freezing up here) looks back on the efforts of himself and his cohort -- those economists who came of age between the Great Depression and the antiwar movement of the late 60s, who, he says, "were aware not only of the virtues of a market system but also of its limitations" -- to stop being "part of the problem" and become part of the solution. As Keynes said, "If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble,
competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!"
This argument connects to themes expressed in Marglin's latest book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, in which he explains how the assumptions that economists have been wont to make -- that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state -- in fact constitute abstractions that take the most important element -- people -- right out of the equation. These assumptions thus justify a world in which the isolation and alienation, the cruel abstraction from human contact we moderns complain about is not only tolerated, but in some perverse way encouraged for the sake of reigning economic ideology. Marglin, as you can by now guess, argues that we need to get off this track.
||| Stephen Marglin, "Why Economists Are Part of the Problem," Chronicle Review, 2/27/09.
