Callinicos: läs FT

För några veckor sedan debatterade marxisten Alex Callinicos och Financial Times huvud-ekonomikommentator Martin Wolf finanskrisen på King's College London, arrangerat av KCL:s läsegrupp i Kapitalet. Callinicos dissar, föga förvånande, mainstream-NEK, och rekommenderar däremot att man ska läsa Financial Times för att förstå ekonomin/krisen:

"/.../ mainstream academic economics is a disgrace and is essentially applied maths that has given up any attempt to understand the world in which we live; in as much as it attempts to engage with the world, it does so on the basis of nonsensical assumptions.

The basic premise in mainstream thinking about financial markets is something called the "efficient market hypothesis". You only have to state it to recognise it's nonsense. What it says is that, in a properly working financial market, the prices of assets and so on reflect all the relevant information.

Anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with the history of capitalism over the 300 years and the panics and crashes and slumps it's produced knows in an instant this hypothesis is nonsense. Yet it's what has framed mainstream thinking and served to legitimatise the expansion of financial markets we have seen take place in the past few decades.

So don't go to the mainstream academy if you want to understand the crisis.

I'd say go to the Financial Times. Despite the fact I was a Marxist, or perhaps because of it, I've obsessively read the Financial Times for more than 35 years because it does provide analysis of a very high standard and Martin Wolf is very I think a very important figure when it comes to offering analysis that tries to make sense of what is happening.

But even the Financial Times approaches the crisis within very narrow parameters. /.../"

Alex Callinicos, 2 november 2009. text från diskussionen kan laddas hem från KCL-Kapitalet-sidan som jag länkar till ovan.'

---
Vad bör man läsa för att förstå/begripa samhällsekonomin?

Mainstream-nationalekonomin får rätt ofta kritik för att inte hjälpa med detta. Den kritiken är ibland befogad. T ex så rapporterar David Colander och Arjo Klamer i sin surveyundersökning bland doktorander i nationalekonomi på US-amerikanska toppuniversitet att av de förmågor och kompetenser som doktoranderna anser att de får av sin utbildning, så är "förståelse för ekonomin" faktiskt väldigt lågt betygsatt. (!)

Här tänkte jag, inspirerad av Edward Leamers underbara bok Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories (Springer Verlag, 2009) spekulera i detta och höfta kring sådan hjälp

Financial Times 9/10
Economist 8/10
Marx Kapitalet 7/10
Leamers Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories 8/10
Klas Eklund, Vår ekonomi 6/10
Rodrik (ed) In Search of Prosperity 10/10
Rodrik One economics many recipes 7/10

(obs! betygen ska inte tas på stort allvar)

---
UPPDATERING
Citerar från Brad DeLongs blogg:

"Robert Skidelsky says that when Keynes lectured at Cambridge about monetary theory, he would begin by reading an article from the FT (or occasionally tje Economist), and then ask: 'What is the theory that lies behind this argument? Is it coherent? Could it be correct? How can we find out?' And that is how he would teach monetary theory at Cambridge."

DeLong, "Keynes and the FT", 12 november 2010

DeLong om relevans, FT-läsning och makro-undervisning: "What Should Macroeconomics Do?", 12 november 2010.