Economics, as they teach it now, is IRRELEVENT. Here's why...

[EVDebs]

Laissez-faire/freemarket economics 'works' only
when there is abundance and 'all things being equal', the ceteris paribus
stuff they teach you in microeconomics in order to distract you from the
real world. I caught this paragraph from the classic Hot Money and The
Politics of Debt, by R. T. Naylor

""Whatever the total of capital flight from developing countries, it is
sufficient to make nonsense of conventional financial statistics, and
therefore of the economic policy prescriptions based on them."

In other words, toss your textbooks in the brave new world of
globalization because capital flight will perversely ruin anything you've
been taught to do in class !

We're seeing this right now with Bernanke trying to 'talk up' higher
interest rates in order to prop up the dollar while simultaneously China,
India, et al, keep selling the manufactured goods we rely on for our
daily lives. Sooner rather than later this will catch up with us. And
unregulated 'free' market claptrap is of no use then but only makes
matters worse. I'm hearing now that Kansas Republicans are changing
parties and becoming Democrats. They must have smelled the coffee !

[opihimoimoi]

1. Stronger Coffee and Visine for Americans is working...slowly but inevitable

Reason results. If we are to choose Paths...then Reason is ther only way to go...if we want the ultimate PEACE.

Goodness(REASON) is way better than Oppression/Nationalism/Militarism/Facism/etc

[TreasonousBastard]

2. In my first economics course...

the chairman of the department opened up with a lecture saying that everything we were to learn in micro was pure bullshit, and just doesn't work in the real world. But, like Newton's understanding of gravity, it was all we had till the next wave of geniuses comes along.

He said that there were a few valuable things to learn in some other courses us eco majors would take, but most of it depended on pure, theoretical conditions that just never exist.

He invited us to work on something that actually works, and promised a Nobel was waiting for whoever did it.

[FloridaPat]

3. I took an econ 101 course in college in 1868. Didn't understand anything

then. After years of watching, my opinion of econ is that it's a fake science where people get paid big bucks to make decisions and maybe they'll work out and maybe they won't. I don't think anyone knows anything. And the way the gov't has been run since Reagan, I don't think anyone in DC has a clue on how to run a country.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

6. In 1868?

Congrats on your longevity! ;) I agree with what you said, though. IMO economics classes in college are designed to deliberately confuse the average student.

[FloridaPat]

8. Oops. Good catch. 1968. Bet it was the same econ course they

were giving in 1868 too.

[AJH032]

4. Micro vs. Macro

I would somewhat agree that a lot of microeconomic theory just doesn't hold true in the real world. In fact, the main reason macroeconomics emerged as a separate set of theory from microeconomics was because the classical microeconomic theory just wasn't explaining real world events (mostly around the Great Depression). Even in macroeconomics, there's a lot of controversy as to how different models and theories actually work, but I think it does as good a job as possible at describing something so complex as a large economy.

[Union Thug]

5. To me it's irrelevent because it takes as gospel...

an economic system hardly a step removed from the Feudal system. Humans can create any goddamned economic system we want, and we decide to prop up this monstrosity?

[EVDebs]

7. Plan B 2.0 says we'll need a new system soon...sometime before

2031.

[FloridaPat]

9. I read John Kenneth Galbraith when I was a college senior.

I couldn't get through the first paragraph. 80% of the words he used I had never seen before. That could explain why econ is so messed up.

[EVDebs]

11. Galbraith and Keynes were a helluvalot clearer thinking than supplysiders

and the likes of Milton Friedman, William Simon, Arthur Laffer, etc. etc.

The ONE thing that economics classes had right was that the 'marginal propensity to consume' of people in the lower wage brackets supports policies that gear tax cuts to THEM, since there are more of them and they'll spend that money domestically.

This is the point I'm trying to make about how economics today has been perverted. The supply-side idiots have perverted fiscal and monetary policy soooooooooo badly that it's almost beyond repair now.

"Conservatives" look at your handiwork: huge governmental and trade deficits; war without end (amen ?) and hypocrisy and divisiveness. Washington's Farewell Address needs to be re-read to them, but oops, they read it to them before the start of every session of Congress. Their comprehension is poor.

[LiberalEconomist]

13. Please, oh please go back

and read Galbraith's theory of countervailing power and "The Affluent Society." Here is also a link: http://www.economyprofessor.com/economictheories/countervailing-power.php

[politicat]

10. And it doesn't work at all for any system that must include agriculture.

Since ag and industry are diametrically opposed economic systems. The former is about long term sustainability and productivity, while the latter is all about short-term gains. When you run ag on short term terms, you get dust bowls and suicide farmers.

And since we can't drink the oil directly, we must always have agriculture, and so our economic system is not as described from the moment we crack a book about it.

[LiberalEconomist]

12. Whenever someone says:

"Anyone who has taken an elementary economics course will know that blah, blah, free market, blah, blah, free market..." My retort has been (in my best Ronald Reagan voice) "Well...that's your problem. You have only done an elementary economics course." The models presented in neo-classical texts are like stick figure art. They are a starting point in conceptualizing what is going on. They are not, in anyway, the best existing approaches to understanding human behavior.

For those of you who have slammed microeconomics, particularly in its Walraasian form I would like to suggest "Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution" by Samuel Bowles. Bowles is one of the new, brave scholars out there who has led the way to provide a viable alternative to the established orthodoxy that has plagued our academic environment since the damned French (Sayes and Walraas, and the laissez faire bullshit) did their damage.

[Odin2005]

14. Economics defitiely isn't science.

It's mostly after-the-fact "post-dictions" to explain why something happened. It has degenerated a long way since Adam Smith, who was originally an ethicist and created his economic theories to apply his ideas about human nature on the economy, nowdays economics is mostly mathamatic sophistry used by capitalists to legitimize themselves. This is why "mainstream" economics tends to ignore the Labor Theory of Value first laid out by Adam Smith and elaborated by Ricardo and Marx, since the ultimate logical conclusion of it is that profit is theft from employees, dangerous notions to the capitalists.

[CAcyclist]

15. There's a good article in, I believe, Dollars and Sense,

that discusses the theory of the free market with the "invisible guiding hand" as basically a religion, whereas the new economic model of evolutionary economics which is closer to chaos theory in physics actually works.

[izzybeans]

16. YOu'd probably do better in a soc or poli sci class

They taught us a long time ago that the invisible hand was nothing but mere flying spaghetti.