The professional study of economics has become ideological brainwashing. It is a defense of the excesses of the capitalist system.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.
It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.
I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics, watch out.
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
Economics has become as riveting as politics.
I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
Economics is a strange science. Our subject deals with some of the most important as well as mundane issues that impinge on the human condition.
Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.
Economics is not brain surgery.