IF THERE IS ONE THING we as human beings must have come to accept and appreciate based on our life experiences, it is that nothing is fixed or constant and, in fact, that everything, irrespective of nature and scope, is subject to change in one form or another.
The discipline, of which I am a part, is a shining example of something that has undergone a significant amount of changes over time – changes in paradigms and methodological approaches to solving difficult and challenging problems confronting all societies globally.
While some, for varying reasons, may see the changes taking place in the field of economics as cumbersome and difficult to cope with, your humble servant sees those changes as natural developments, born of three things: first, the ease of massive number-crunching in today’s computer-driven world, combined with second, the serious limitations of existing bourgeois economic theory (and no serious development of Marx and Lenin’s economic theoretical work since those two gentlemen died, and especially after Stalinism took over the then Soviet Union and its satellites) to explain and predict economic events.
It is much easier to use mathematics, statistics and econometrics as substitutes for the really hard work of theorising – building theories, used in its strict, scientific sense: (a) explaining convincingly the past and present and (b) predicting, with usable accuracy, what will happen, based on economic (or economic-related) stimuli which either occur “naturally”; that is, endogenously; or is introduced into an economy by human agency: exogenously.
Third, ideological factors are, in my view, the principal reasons for the poor state of economic theorising. This problem began with the Cold War. The fight, then, was to “prove” that Marx was wrong about everything. To pretend, for example, that there was no relationship between bourgeois economics’ “business cycles” and Marx’s “periodic crises of overproduction”. That glaring shortcoming in economics was evident at many western universities throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Frankly, Marx and his approach to economics began to be “mentioned” again only after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. Simply amazing, but true.
Unfortunately, the collapse of pseudo-socialist regimes in Eastern Europe did not result in an honest evaluation of both existing bourgeois and socialist economic theory and, out of such, the development of new theory with explanatory power for today’s world.
This is because the universities have become increasingly “corporatised” serving ever more closely the interests of the one per cent in America, Europe, and elsewhere. Dispassionate economic enquiry finds few homes in today’s universities and one’s career advancement is far better secured by staying clear of “rocking the boat”.
Counting the relatively harmless interactions of grains of sand with econometric models and powerful computers and being able to tell us quite a bit about those grains of sand, is far safer than asking questions like: who owns the sand? Who puts the sand there in the first place? Who will end up with virtually all the sand, shortly?
And, by what mechanisms will this result be achieved?
Indeed, we live in interesting times in which the history of economics continues to evolve. As students of economics, we all ought to get fully on board with the changing tides and times.
