PeakOil is You
THE "Telling Others About Peak Oil" Thread pt 3 (merged)
Re: THE "Telling Others About Peak Oil" Thread pt 3 (merged)
by Loki » Fri 21 Mar 2014, 20:18:15
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'S')o who can blame economists for believing that money makes energy: after all it has been that way as long as the "science" of economics has been around.
I recently relistened to Kunstler's interview with Brian Czech, an ecological economist. Czech explained that in the early days of academic economics, the production function included land, labor, and capital. This was later winnowed down to labor and capital, particularly among the University of Chicago school. Land (which includes all natural resources) was left out of the equation, partly as a backlash against Henry George's land tax scheme.
Not sure how accurate this assessment of academic economic theory is, but it's pretty obvious most economists these days are willfully stupid when it comes to natural resources, particularly non-renewable resources.
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Re: THE "Telling Others About Peak Oil" Thread pt 3 (merged)
by Keith_McClary » Sat 22 Mar 2014, 00:50:21
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'S')o who can blame economists for believing that money makes energy: after all it has been that way as long as the "science" of economics has been around.
I recently relistened to Kunstler's interview with Brian Czech, an ecological economist. Czech explained that in the early days of academic economics, the production function included land, labor, and capital. This was later winnowed down to labor and capital, particularly among the University of Chicago school. Land (which includes all natural resources) was left out of the equation, partly as a backlash against Henry George's land tax scheme.
Not sure how accurate this assessment of academic economic theory is, but it's pretty obvious most economists these days are willfully stupid when it comes to natural resources, particularly non-renewable resources.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'G'): We all know that you’re an independent economist, you offer a different point of view, but one thing that was really striking during the Celtic Tiger here was that the entire profession of economists completely bought into the ridiculously flawed neoclassical models. Can you talk about how the profession of economists played their role in building all this up?
Prof. H: They’re indoctrinated. There are two ways the Chicago School of economics pushed neoliberal theories. In Chile, they went down under the Pinochet regime and closed every economics department in the country that didn’t teach their Chicago School theories. They assassinated labor leaders, they assassinated economists and professors, and had a continent wide terrorism campaign, Operation Condor, which killed tens of thousands of intellectuals. They didn’t have to do that in Ireland or America.
In American they gained control of the main refereed economic journals. And that means that in the United States – and probably Ireland and Europe too – when you graduate with your PhD and want to go into teaching, you have to get promoted by being published in arefereed journal. But the referees are Chicago boys or Harvard neoliberals. They are ideological totalitarians. The free market boys realize that you cannot have a free market without having utter totalitarian control. That’s what they’ve achieved.
The aim of totalitarian control is to make sure that there is no alternative. So by the time I graduated from NYU, I was told – by a professor who worked for the CIA – that it was not worth while studying the history of economic thought, because if economic theories were good, they would have succeeded by Survival of the Fittest. If they weren’t taught, it’s because they were outdated and obsolete. So, in the United States they’ve dropped the history of economic thought from the academic curriculum. They’ve even dropped economic history. So you’re not going to learn what was taught when I was in school 50 years ago: the history of rent theory, price and value theory.
The whole edifice of analysing the distinction between earned and unearned income, economic rent and profit – all this has been stripped away from the curriculum and does not appear in the economic journals. So, what you really have in academic economics is junk economics. I think you’ve had Steve Keen on your show and he’s written a book, Debunking Economics, explaining much about that. I’ve written on similar lines on international trade theory.
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