Showing posts with label Robert Johnson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Johnson. Show all posts

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Lynn Stuart Parramore — Meet the 28-year-old Student Who Exposed Two Harvard Professors Whose Shoddy Research Drove Global Austerity


Marshall Auerback gets a shout out for being one of the first to call out R & R, along with INET's Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson.

AlterNet

Meet the 28-year-old Student Who Exposed Two Harvard Professors Whose Shoddy Research Drove Global Austerity
Lynn Stuart Parramore

Monday, November 26, 2012

Robert Johnson — What About the Questions That Economics Can’t Answer?

Can economics be morally centered? And perhaps more importantly, should it be?
These are questions that society is grappling with in the face of the economics profession's failure to confront the global impact of exploding inequality within and between countries. 
Limitations of the Dismal Science
Economists are very good at studying mechanisms for efficiently allocating things. But they are less effective at addressing more fundamental questions related to these things' social value. Indeed, economists typically leave values unexamined in their mathematical formulas. Social utility is simply not explored.

But what happens when economists' implicit value assumptions break down?
Yahoo Finance
What About the Questions That Economics Can’t Answer?
Robert Johnson | Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking
(h/t Stephan Ewald via Twitter)

It's necessary to view human knowledge as an integrated whole rather than atomized into separate and distinct disciplines.

On one hand, economics is a subset of political economy, which is a subset of social and political philosophy, which is a subset of ethics. Ethics interfaces with metaphysics and epistemology in formulating the fundamental POV of a system of thought.

The other hand, economics as a science is subset of cognitive-science-psychology and social science and is informed by other social sciences such as anthropology and sociology. Psychology and sociology are subsets of life science, including biology and evolutionary theory. Economics, being focused on real resources and production, also depends on hard sciences and their application, e.g., physics, engineering.

Moreover, all thought must find expression to be communicated and therefore, logic and its branches, mathematics and analytic philosophy-philosophy of language are also essential.

This list is not offered as exhaustive. Indeed, the entire body of human reflection impacts economics to some degree and ignoring important contributions from any field is myopic.

Considering economics in isolation from the entire system and the subsystems in which it is nested results in persistent ignorance and often malignant error.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Robert Johnson — Economists: A Profession at Sea


After the financial crisis of 2008, the Queen of England asked economists, “Why did no one see the credit crunch coming?” Three years later, a group of Harvard under­graduate students walked out of introductory economics and wrote, “Today, we are walking out of your class, ­Economics 101, 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.”
What has happened? Rebellion from both above and below suggests that economists, who were recently at the core of power and social leadership in our society, are no longer trusted. Not long ago, the principal theories of economics appeared to be the secular religion of society. Today, economics is a discipline in disrepute. It’s as if our ship of state broke from its stable mooring and unexpectedly slammed into the rocks. How could things have gone so spectacularly wrong? And what can be done to repair economics so economists can play a productive role in helping society?
Read the rest at Time | Business
Economists: A Profession at Sea
by Robert Johnson

Must-read (because he agrees with what I have been saying for some time). :)