Random Plug

Next post will have to be about rum I suppose.
I generally hate the "human interest" side of sports but, Tigers fan, Yankee fan, or general baseball fan, Curtis Granderson happens to be the rare combination of professional athlete and decent writer (at least entertaining). Check it out if you have some time.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew?author=Curtis+Granderson

The Political Action of Teaching

As always when starting a semester of teaching "introduction to macroeconomics" I am wondering how much Marx I should include, how critical I should be of the material in the text book that I am using, and how much emphasis to place on the idea that what I am presenting are theories and not "facts".

From the epistemological view that I favor all theories contain their own set of facts and there is no external truth.
The reality of course is that I will not get into this level of subtlety in an introduction to economics course.

The question then is should I be honest in that what I present are only possible theories (which runs the risk of confusing students who are seeing their first ever economics material)? or pertaining to my last post is it the "right" thing to do to present the conclusions of theories that I favor as "economics".

The latter is what the hegemonic neoclassical school has been doing for generations in economics education in this country, but is resorting to their tactics a useful way to combat their ideology?

I have not decided how overtly political my teaching process will be this semester, but anyone who claims they can teach a-politically is either self deluded or a liar.
The very action of presenting some material and skimming over other is a political process and the question that seems important to me is to what level do we owe it to our intro students to make them aware of this process? And how much more success will I have in teaching for example that all profit comes from exploitation rather than the MPK if I present it as fact rather than a competing theory?

Engaging Conservative Economics

The inspiration for this post came from a recent exchange on the list serve of graduate students in the economics department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (many of whom also blog, a list of these blogs can be found HERE).

I will not summarize the email thread for reasons that should become clear in the following post.

I feel that far to much effort on the part of so called "heterodox economists" is spent criticizing what is often referred to as "mainstream" or "neoclassical" economics.

I do not dispute that critical analysis of the mainstream is an important part of our task as radical economists. The very nature of the terms mainstream and radical (or heterodox) imply that their theories are more commonly accepted than ours, and thus are more widely taught, and unfortunately accepted.

The flip side of this which is commonly ignored by many of my colleagues is that the very process of criticism legitimizes neoclassical economic theories as being worth our time. The process of criticism relies on the implicit assumption that these theories are worth the time to think about.

A person presenting a theory that human civilization started on jupiter and migrated to earth when jupiter was full would find their basic intelligence criticized, not aspects within the theory that they are presenting (such as how people traveled through the solar system). This big picture approach needs to find a larger role withing radical economics. By accepting assumptions of the mainstream economic theories we are wasting valuable resources (time) that could (and I argue should) be spent further developing weak points in our own theories of the workings of the economy instead of implicitly validating equilibrium based nonsense.

Some Silliness on a Spring Afternoon

It is a well known fact that the Bush administration had a hand in the attacks of September 11th 2001. For concrete evidence you need look no further than South Park Episode 1009 "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce", available here.
It goes without saying that a big part of the motivation for these actions by the Republican administration was to be able to funnel American tax payer money to their friends and supporters in the defense industry.

I would argue that Obama's democratic administration has intentionally caused the current oil spill in the golf of Mexico with similar motives. The only difference is this will allow the Obama administration to funnel tax payer money to their friends and supporters in the green jobs sector of the economy.

Disaster politics may be the wave of the future. As for proof...who needs it? I have a website. Thanks for being a good sport about this...
Finally...it is inevitable that some jackass at PBS is going to make a documentary about this...remember you heard it here first!