Occupy Wall Street is spreading everywhere, even to the hallowed halls of Harvard University. Greg Mankiw's entire class walked out of his lecture in protest! This may be the beginning of a general revolt against entrenched neo-liberal economic bias. That would be awesome!!
Check out what the students wrote:
| "Dear Professor Mankiw— Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society. As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today. A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory." |
Check out the full letter here.
The students are teaching the teacher!
ReplyDeleteMMTers should get their graduate students' CVs ready. I suspect a surge in aggregate demand for heterodox economists is on the horizon.
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ReplyDeleteGee, now if this distaste for bias would only spread to the rest of academia all the gender studies, cultural studies, minority studies and environmental studies classes would be empty too. No chance of those biases being protested though.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most exciting protests I've seen yet. My only quibble is with the line about Adam Smith. Smith wrote NOTHING LIKE the nonsense modern-day "conservatives" pitch.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, it was reportedly only 5-10% of the class.
ReplyDeletesadly, only a small fraction of the class understands why neo-liberal economics are bad. The rest just go to class and memorize the propaganda.
ReplyDeleteI don't think they want an accurate teaching of economics, just ones that fits with their ideology. Maybe it does match w/OWS.
ReplyDeleteSo if only 5-10% walked out (90-95% stayed) and this article states the "entire class" left, is there going to be some retraction or correction? Nah, just let it sit as is for the completely false but sensational headline. Nice.
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