Bazaars, Conversations & Freedom Quotes

“As the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard, a powerful Washington insider and advisor to two Republican presidents, Martin S. Feldstein was accustomed to being taken very seriously. He taught Ec 10, the introductory economics course at Harvard, for twenty years and this made some of the most powerful people in the USA his former students. So it might have come as a rude shock for Feldstein to be told in Spring 2003, not merely by a bunch of rebellious students but some of his fellow faculty, that his course was not only not good enough, it was misleading. This disturbance was triggered by Students for a Humane and Responsible Economics (SHARE), a Harvard-based off-shoot of the Post-Autistic Economics Network. But significantly, the actual petition demanding changes in Ec 10 was drafted by one of Feldstein’s colleagues, Prof. Stephen A. Marglin, himself a Harvard graduate and a veteran member of the faculty. The petition asked: If this course is meant to be an introduction to basic economic principles and methods, why is its content limited to the neo-liberal variety of economics? Why does it create the impression that there are no other models in the field of economics? Why isn’t there a plurality of approaches adapted to the complexity of objects analysed? By not providing a truly open marketplace for ideas Harvard failed to prepare students to be critical thinkers and engaged citizens, alleged SHARE. Its mission statement went on to argue that the standard economic models taught at Harvard were loaded with values and political convictions which inevitably influenced, if not defined, the students’ worldview as well as their career choices. Above all, said the petition, ‘ . . . by falsely presenting economics as a positive science devoid of ethical values, we believe Harvard strips students of their intellectual agency and prevents them from being able to make up their own minds.”
― Rajni Bakshi, Bazaars, Conversations & Freedom: for a market culture beyond greed and fear