Geoff Davies — Sack the Economists

Non-mainstream economists are all-too aware of the failure of mainstream economists to anticipate, let alone avoid, the Global Financial Crisis and the ensuing Great Recession. The mainstream profession is also failing to fix the problem, and is actually making it worse.

It is hard to get alternative views heard, and the mainstream carries on almost totally unperturbed, despite being centrally responsible for a global disaster. This is of course extremely frustrating.

After reading yet another cri de coeur from yet another frustrated economist, I thought perhaps we need to spell out the message in all bluntness: we need to sack the economists (the mainstreamers). We also need to derail their baleful ideology. That means we need to disband the departments of neoclassical economics, so the poison is not passed on to any more hapless generations.

When I say “we”, I really mean “we, the people”. The job can’t be done by a small band of isolated reformers. That means people need to be informed and persuaded. They need to be spoken to in terms they understand; not everyone, but opinion leaders and interested laypeople, of whom there are many.

Thus was I moved to write the short ebook: Sack the Economists and Disband Their Departments.
The title may seem to be a bit confronting at first, but the book is a concisely argued case, not a rant. The bluntness is justified by the fundamental flaws in mainstream economic ideas. There are not just one or two flaws, there are many. Neither are they just obscure theoretical flaws.

Real-World Economics Review Blog

Sack the Economists

Geoff Davies | retired geophysicist at the Australian National University and the author of Economia: New Economic Systems to Empower People and Support the Living World