Sunday, November 11, 2012

Harvard's Greg Mankiw: a-political economics

A glaring example of conceited academic ignorance: Harvard's professor Greg Mankiw, reacting to a mass undergrad walkout from his economics lecture, insisted that he taught a "mainstream economics course", without political agenda. The undergrads accused him of teaching the kind of economic ideology that brings about inequality in society.

What is shocking here is that Professor Mankiw, whose textbooks are used in Yale, Harvard and Princeton to prepare the future US elite, seems utterly unaware of how a science power relationships and socially constructed meanings define the episteme of a science. His influence reaches beyond the academia: he served as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the second Bush Administration and an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
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For too many economists, society, environment and human beings are secondary by-products or unfortunate pesky nuisances getting in the way of creating neat PowerPoint presentation of quantifiable data. Steve Keen's and Tom Keene's responses prove that Mankiw's grandiloquent parochialism is by no means an exception in the highest echelons of America's academia. With hardly any exposure to other social sciences, such scientists are neither taught, nor able to teach how to  understand how the system works, and instead simply pass a knowledge of how to perpetuate the status quo for as long as possible, without ever questioning it, demonising any opposing view as communism or socialism.

This is how the US got herself, as well as the rest of the world, to the edge of the financial cliff. Kudos to the brave Harvard undergrads! Humankind apparently is not beyond redeeming.

 


Saturday, November 10, 2012

Regrets anthropologiques

I just found out that Edward T. Hall, the cross-cultural anthropologist, whose work provided inspiration for my Master's thesis, died aged 95 in his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on July 20, 2009. Just to think that I was in the area when he was still alive but I had no idea he lived there. I have very few regrets in my life but this is one of them.

Another one is that in all my visits to Paris it never occurred to me to pay respects (even if by lurking in front of his windows for a few minutes) to  Claude Lévi-Strauss when he was still alive. I simply did not realise that. He died in October 2009 in the venerable age of 101.

I also remember passing by the door of Eric Hobsbawm's room in 30 Russell Square every week on my way to a Comparative Anthropology lecture. Oh, the awe the very sight of it inspired in me! In his 90s and retired, he probably never was inside anyway, yet now I think I should have at least tried to knock.

There is a lesson in everything and I think I have learnt mine..