by From Lars Syll A science that fails to reflect on its own history and neglects critical methodological and theoretical questions about its practice is a science in crisis. As early as 1991, a commission led by Anne Krueger—featuring esteemed economists such as Kenneth Arrow, Edward Leamer, and Joseph Stiglitz—highlighted a fundamental weakness in graduate economics education. Drawing from their own experiences, they observed an alarming disconnect between theoretical and econometric tools and real-world problems. They noted that both students and faculty felt the absence of “facts, institutional information, data, real-world issues, applications, and policy problems.” Their conclusion was stark: graduate programs were producing “a generation with too many idiot savants skilled in
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from Lars Syll
A science that fails to reflect on its own history and neglects critical methodological and theoretical questions about its practice is a science in crisis.
As early as 1991, a commission led by Anne Krueger—featuring esteemed economists such as Kenneth Arrow, Edward Leamer, and Joseph Stiglitz—highlighted a fundamental weakness in graduate economics education. Drawing from their own experiences, they observed an alarming disconnect between theoretical and econometric tools and real-world problems. They noted that both students and faculty felt the absence of “facts, institutional information, data, real-world issues, applications, and policy problems.” Their conclusion was stark: graduate programs were producing “a generation with too many idiot savants skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues.”
More than three decades later, little has changed. Economics—and the way it is taught—remains in dire need of reform.
A growing number of young economics students are demanding meaningful change. They seek more than a rigid adherence to mainstream dogma; they want an education that engages with the complexities of the real world. They refuse to be force-fed outdated, irrelevant theories and models that fail to address the pressing economic challenges of our time.
The call for change is clear. Will economics finally listen?
And still, amidst all this tumult, many economists are disinclined to rethink the foundations of their field. It reminds me of the closing joke in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall. A guy has a crazy brother who thinks he is a chicken. The doctor asks, ‘Why don’t you turn him in?’ The guy replies, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ ”
Why is the free-market discourse so perdurable despite so many social, ecological, and political realities that call its logic and categories of thought into question? Because the whole field, despite its flaws, is functional enough and entrenched. It needs the eggs — the certitude of quantitative analysis aping the hard sciences, the credentialed expertise always in demand by powerful institutions, the prestige that comes with proximity to power.
But behind these factors, there is a new world a-bornin’ that economics needs to engage with and understand. There are brilliant economic thinkers like Kate Raworth, inventor of “doughnut economics” framework; the writings of degrowth economist Jason Hickel and the late anthropologist David Graeber; the thinkers associated with the web journal Real World Economics; and a number of student associations clamoring for new economic paradigms and pedagogy. Beyond reading the right things, I find that it helps a lot to hang out with the right crowd, listen to serious new voices, and bring one’s full humanity to the questions of the moment.
Economists of all ages — but especially younger ones who have the suppleness and imagination to grow — need to pay attention to these outsider voices. There is a new world that is fast-overtaking us, and it needs to be seen and explained on its own terms.