Occupy Econ 101

Students stage walk-out on Harvard Prof.

212 comments Kono Matsu, 04 November 2011

When a science is dying, disciples begin to refuse initiation.

This is what happened last Wednesday in the class of Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw, with these simple opening words: “Today, we are walking out of your class.”

The rejection of Mankiw’s class is only a single event in the class of one professor, and yet this refusal may prove to be an event with a much wider significance. Mankiw's econ 101 textbook, Principles of Economics, has made it into the minds of almost every economics student in the modern world and if the students of Mankiw can revolt, then it is possible that students everywhere can begin the task of rethinking the dysfunctional old neoclassical paradigm.

In response to the walk-out, Mankiw has only doubled down his orthodoxy, claiming that the 1% have suffered more than the 99% as a result of the recession. Now is the time for a global walk-out. Download a poster of the True Cost Economics Manifesto at kickitover.org and pin it up in the corridor of your department. Let's start an all out meme war against our neoclassical profs and begin the daunting task of ushering in a new bionomic, psychonomic, ecological economics paradigm.

Now is a good time to begin an escalation and turn the whole world into a grand economics department … to occupy it.

Send pics of what's happening at your campus to [email protected]

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

Update: Check out the video of students walking out of Professor N. Gregory Mankiw's Economics 10 class:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKS1jZxWLPM

212 comments on the article “Occupy Econ 101”

Displaying 11 - 20 of 212

Anonymous

04 November 2011 at 05:25 pm

You sir need to read. Neoliberal economic theory has been empirically debunked. Read some nobel prize winning economists (Amartya Sen, Paul Krugman) or look at some international EMPIRICAL DATA and you would know that our economic system is designed around flawed theory. You CAN build a new economic system built around different theory.

Just because you've always been told something is true does not make it so. Look at the data of how things have actually played out and not just theory.

Anonymous

04 November 2011 at 05:25 pm

Just because you've always been told something is true does not make it so. Look at the data of how things have actually played out and not just theory.

ChicagoJohn

05 November 2011 at 11:55 am

Paul Krugman said that if Obama's economic plan was passed, then the unemployment rate would "only" stay at 7.3%, which he said, would be "spun" as a "failure".
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/stimulus-arithmetic-wonkish-but-important/

"Unemployment is currently about 7 percent, and heading much higher; Obama himself says that absent stimulus it could go into double digits. Suppose that we’re looking at an economy that, absent stimulus, would have an average unemployment rate of 9 percent over the next two years; this plan would cut that to 7.3 percent, which would be a help but could easily be spun by critics as a failure."

The next time you want to talk about empirical data while bragging about a Nobel prize winning economist, you should also look at his results.