Robert Reich pulls it all together

Today I heard the economist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on National Public Radio with a great commentary on the state of our national economy. Here's an excerpt:

According to new polls, the economy is the number 1 issue for American voters. But that's not just because the economy is slowing and mortgages are harder to come by. The real reason is middle-class families have exhausted the coping mechanisms they've used for over three decades to get by on median wages that are barely higher than they were in 1970, adjusted for inflation.

For the economics students of the world

Our lives are intrinsically intertwined with economics, writ large. Unfortunately, the discipline of economics itself, as taught in our colleges and universities, has been straitjacketed by neoclassical or orthodox believers, who have narrowed and narrowed the scope of economic studies and inquiry. As one economics professor told me, “we have not only eliminated any dissenting viewpoints. We have burned their bodies, buried them and stomped on their graves.” !

I recently learned of an international student effort to lobby their economics departments to take off their blinders and allow for multiple viewpoints in economics. Here's an excerpt from their website:

The PAE movement is not about trying to replace neoclassical economics with another partial truth, but rather about reopening economics for free scientific inquiry, making it a pursuit where empiricism outranks a priorism and where critical thinking rules instead of ideology.

My point isn't to trash every economics professor in the country. But the discipline itself is in danger of irrelevancy, as it refuses to reflect upon the uncertainty surrounding most of the big questions in economics.