Occupy Econ 101
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 51 - 60 of 212
Page 6 of 22
Anonymous
I wrote a whole rant and it can be summarized in two statements:
If you don't like it, do something else.
Don't lump all capitalism under the current consumerism that you experience (a kind of consumerism that I disagree with and battle against on a daily basis).
Anonymous
I wrote a whole rant and it can be summarized in two statements:
If you don't like it, do something else.
Don't lump all capitalism under the current consumerism that you experience (a kind of consumerism that I disagree with and battle against on a daily basis).
Barry G.
Economics is taught like a religion.
It used to be that high school indoctrinated students to support societies institutions.
College and University was all about discovering how those institutions work and challenging them -- finding out who the man behind the curtain was, rather than just believing the hoax in front of you.
It would appear that they are merely trying to indoctrinate people all the way through university now -- they are trying to skip who the man behind the curtain is altogether.
I think schools only offer one economic model as being the right way.
And if they even mention other economic models, it's always focusing on the horrible extreme cases to make it sound like capitalism is the only economic model that works. It's taught to be the hero amongst the bad apples.
To all the losers who post, saying it's just corporatism that's bad, capitalism is not.
That's alot like putting some ice cream outside in the sun. Ultimately, the ice cream melts and goes bad. It was good for awhile though.
Some genius has an idea though, to get the ice cream back to being good -- starting over with some fresh ice cream -- as if the outcome is going to be different, and the ice cream won't melt the second time. No, trust me, the ice cream will melt again, and you'll end up with corporatism all over again.
Starting back with "pure capitalism" won't help anything.
Capitalism always ends up the same.
It's critically flawed -- always has been. When the economic model *needs* a certain amount of people to be unemployed, it's not a good model to begin with.
Back to the drawing board.
Barry G.
Economics is taught like a religion.
It used to be that high school indoctrinated students to support societies institutions.
College and University was all about discovering how those institutions work and challenging them -- finding out who the man behind the curtain was, rather than just believing the hoax in front of you.
It would appear that they are merely trying to indoctrinate people all the way through university now -- they are trying to skip who the man behind the curtain is altogether.
I think schools only offer one economic model as being the right way.
And if they even mention other economic models, it's always focusing on the horrible extreme cases to make it sound like capitalism is the only economic model that works. It's taught to be the hero amongst the bad apples.
To all the losers who post, saying it's just corporatism that's bad, capitalism is not.
That's alot like putting some ice cream outside in the sun. Ultimately, the ice cream melts and goes bad. It was good for awhile though.
Some genius has an idea though, to get the ice cream back to being good -- starting over with some fresh ice cream -- as if the outcome is going to be different, and the ice cream won't melt the second time. No, trust me, the ice cream will melt again, and you'll end up with corporatism all over again.
Starting back with "pure capitalism" won't help anything.
Capitalism always ends up the same.
It's critically flawed -- always has been. When the economic model *needs* a certain amount of people to be unemployed, it's not a good model to begin with.
Back to the drawing board.
Anonymous
Replace capitalism with communism?--No! We need, what I would call, a " People's Capitalism." --an entrepreneurial system that is under the firm control of the PEOPLE. Kill oligarchic capitalism, and establish Democratic Capitalism.
Anonymous
Replace capitalism with communism?--No! We need, what I would call, a " People's Capitalism." --an entrepreneurial system that is under the firm control of the PEOPLE. Kill oligarchic capitalism, and establish Democratic Capitalism.
hsansom
Mankiw is one of the more vile professors in academia (he has plenty of company at Harvard). Mankiw has skated very close to endorsing eugenics. A couple of years ago he published a blog entry that made its way around the world; he asserted that "smart genes" present in the genetic make up of the wealthy (wealthy because they are smarter than others) would be passed onto offspring, explaining better performance at schools in wealthy school districts. This is a favorite subject of the right-wing privatize everything realm. Plenty of econometricians at places like the Hoover Institution concocting very clever (and unreproduceable) studies showing that poor districts don't do worse because of overcrowding or socioeconomic problems but because of innate inferiority of people.
Quite astonishing how rapidly the US is marching back into the pre-WW2 supremacist dogma with the pseudo-academic handwaving of the Mankiws and the punditry of the David Brooks brigade.
hsansom
Mankiw is one of the more vile professors in academia (he has plenty of company at Harvard). Mankiw has skated very close to endorsing eugenics. A couple of years ago he published a blog entry that made its way around the world; he asserted that "smart genes" present in the genetic make up of the wealthy (wealthy because they are smarter than others) would be passed onto offspring, explaining better performance at schools in wealthy school districts. This is a favorite subject of the right-wing privatize everything realm. Plenty of econometricians at places like the Hoover Institution concocting very clever (and unreproduceable) studies showing that poor districts don't do worse because of overcrowding or socioeconomic problems but because of innate inferiority of people.
Quite astonishing how rapidly the US is marching back into the pre-WW2 supremacist dogma with the pseudo-academic handwaving of the Mankiws and the punditry of the David Brooks brigade.
Anonymous
Lets not fool ourselves, what we are presented with is not capitalism, not in its original intention as pioneered by Adam Smith.
What we are stuck with today is more mechanical, it is inherently inhuman, cold and without ethic. It has become through the invention of one or two desperate men more about control and manipulation of the human condition (consumerism, greed, want for power, e.t.c) and any other kind of way seems disregarded. A competitive market is supposed to present low prices and more jobs, but where it has gone wrong is globalisation. For some reason someone (who would be considered a genius, but is actually very very stupid) felt it was ok to take their business overseas, or even nationally.
People can accuse all they want that `other people` don`t understand economics but it really is not about understanding economics because understanding economics is just understanding how to manipulate or work within this machine for profit.
Even more worrying is the fact that there is no one at the helm of this machine, even the worst of men would be better than no man at all, it has gathered momentum on its own and the question must be asked can it be stopped?
Anonymous
Lets not fool ourselves, what we are presented with is not capitalism, not in its original intention as pioneered by Adam Smith.
What we are stuck with today is more mechanical, it is inherently inhuman, cold and without ethic. It has become through the invention of one or two desperate men more about control and manipulation of the human condition (consumerism, greed, want for power, e.t.c) and any other kind of way seems disregarded. A competitive market is supposed to present low prices and more jobs, but where it has gone wrong is globalisation. For some reason someone (who would be considered a genius, but is actually very very stupid) felt it was ok to take their business overseas, or even nationally.
People can accuse all they want that `other people` don`t understand economics but it really is not about understanding economics because understanding economics is just understanding how to manipulate or work within this machine for profit.
Even more worrying is the fact that there is no one at the helm of this machine, even the worst of men would be better than no man at all, it has gathered momentum on its own and the question must be asked can it be stopped?
Pages
Add a new comment