Quotes from RWER
Thoughts that led to
the creation of this journal
". . . economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems"
Milton Friedman
“[Economics as taught] in America's graduate schools... bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science.”
Joseph Stiglitz
"Existing economics is a theoretical [meaning mathematical] system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world"
Ronald Coase
“We live in an uncertain and ever-changing world that is continually evolving in new and novel ways. Standard theories are of little help in this context. Attempting to understand economic, political and social change requires a fundamental recasting of the way we think”
Douglass North
“Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas […] Year after year economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data”
Wassily Leontief
“Today if you ask a mainstream economist a question about almost any aspect of economic life, the response will be: suppose we model that situation and see what happens…modern mainstream economics consists of little else but examples of this process”
Robert Solow
"Economics is supposed to be social science, i.e. an intellectual discipline resting upon empirically-observed facts, in which mathematics and conceptual frameworks are tools for understanding. But in contemporary mainstream economics, the tools are often in the driver's seat, declaring evident facts impossible and reducing the subtleties of the real world to whatever clockwork economists best know how to build."
Ian Fletcher
“Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.”
Mark Blaug
“. . . the close to monopoly position of neoclassical economics is not compatible with normal ideas about democracy. Economics is science in some senses, but is at the same time ideology. Limiting economics to the neoclassical paradigm means imposing a serious ideological limitation. Departments of economics become political propaganda centers . . .”
Peter Söderbaum
“Economics students . . . graduate from Masters and PhD programs with an effectively vacuous understanding of economics, no appreciation of the intellectual history of their discipline, and an approach to mathematics that hobbles both their critical understanding of economics and their ability to appreciate the latest advances in mathematics and other sciences. A minority of these ill-informed students themselves go on to be academic economists, and they repeat the process. Ignorance is perpetuated”
Steve Keen
“The human economy has passed from an “empty world” era in which human-made capital was the limiting factor in economic development to the current “full world” era in which remaining natural capital has become the limiting factor “
Robert Costanza
“Most courses deal with an ‘imaginary world,’ and have no link whatsoever with concrete problems.”
Emmanuelle Benicort
“All of these textbooks fail to explain how prices are determined in ‘markets’’ and thus how markets work. Where do prices come from? Who determines them? How do they fluctuate? These questions are never addressed, even though it is through the price mechanism that the ‘invisible hand’ is supposed to operate.”
Le Mouvement Autisme-Économie
“. . . mainstream economists seek knowledge through numbers to stop the messy reality of people, processes and politics dirtying their invisible hands.”
Alan Shipman
“Multinationals are everywhere except in economic theories and economics departments.”
Grazia Ietto-Gillies
“. . . the economist must engage him or herself as a citizen with convictions regarding the public good and ways of treating it, rather than as the holder of universal truth that he or she substitutes for discussion in order to impose it on us all.”
André Orléan
“The Taliban, and its variety of fundamentalist thinking, has been the most controlling and oppressive regime with regard to women in contemporary times. Contemporary academic economics, and contemporary global economic policies, are gripped by other rigidities of thinking – what George Soros has dubbed ‘market fundamentalism.’ Fantasies of control are operative in both phenomena, and gender is far from irrelevant to understanding their power, and their solution.”
Julie A. Nelson
“There is an urgent need for a more realistic economics of the environment, with theories and analyses that can help to create environmentally sustainable economic activity.”
Frank Ackerman
“Modern economics is not very successful as an explanatory endeavour. This much is accepted by most serious commentators on the discipline, including many of its most prominent exponents”
Tony Lawson
“Because mathematics has swamped the curricula in leading universities and graduate schools, student economists are neither encouraged nor equipped to analyze real world economies and institutions.”
Geoffrey M. Hodgson
“. . . the concepts of uneconomic growth, accumulatingillth, and unsustainable scale have to be incorporated in economic theory if it is to be capable of expressing what is happening in the world. This is what ecological economists are trying to do.”
Herman E. Daly
“The application of mathematics to economics has proved largely unsuccessful because it is based on a misleading analogy between economics and physics. Economics would do much better to model itself on another very successful area, namely medicine, and, like much of medicine, to adopt a qualitative causal methodology.”
Donald Gillies
“Economic history courses have been disappearing from classrooms across the world. Once a compulsory part of economics education, they have been relegated to the remote corners of ‘options’ and even closed down.”
Ha-Joon Chang
“In Smith is a forgotten lesson that the foundation of success in creating a constructive classical liberal society lies in the individuals’ adherence to a common social ethics. According to Smith, virtue serves as ‘the fine polish to the wheels of society’ while vice is ‘likethe vile rust, which makes them jar and grate upon one another.’ Indeed, Smith sought to distance his thesis from that of Mandeville and the implication that individual greed could be the basis for social good. Smith’s deistic universe might not sit well with those of post-enlightenment sensibilities, but his understanding that virtue is a prerequisite for a desirable market society remains an important lesson. For Smith ethics is the hero-not self-interest or greed-for it is ethics that defend social intercourse from the Hobbesian chaos.”
Charles K. Wilber
“. . . conventional economics . . . remains fixated on the view that economics is the physics of society. In other words, most of the profession behaves as if there were a single universally valid view of the world that needs only to be applied.”
Paul Ormerod
Although I never believed it when I was young and held scholars in great respect, it does seem to be the case that ideology plays a large role in economics. How else to explain Chicago’s acceptance of not only general equilibrium but a particularly simplified version of it as ‘true’ or as a good enough approximation to the truth? Or how to explain the belief that the only correct models are linear and that the von Neuman prices are those to which actual prices converge pretty smartly? This belief unites Chicago and the Classicals; both think that the ‘long-run’ is the appropriate period in which to carry out analysis. There is no empirical or theoretical proof of the correctness of this. But both camps want to make an ideological point. To my mind that is a pity since clearly it reduces the credibility of the subject and its practitioners.