ABSTRACT
What’s wrong with economics teaching? The students’ protests In June 2000, a small group of French undergraduate students launched a protest that became known worldwide (Fullbrook 2003). Having decided to study economics in order to understand the world they live in, they had realized that they were not going to make it, despite the fact that they were students in prestigious French institutions, mainly the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Université Paris 1 (“La Sorbonne”). They made their frustration public. A graduate student at the time, I joined the group. At first, everything seemed so wrong that we did not really know how to articulate our protest. We invited Bernard Guerrien, a Sorbonne professor and a fine specialist of neoclassical economics, who told us that our concerns were shared (see the papers collected in Fullbrook 2004). With his intellectual support, we wrote an “open letter” addressed to our teachers.1 The open letter raised three critiques. First, we denounced the fact that economists built up “imaginary worlds,” i.e. unrealistic theories.2 Second, we opposed the use of mathematics as “an end in itself.”3 Last, the open letter pleaded against the “dogmatism” of the curriculum, and for “pluralism.” In fact, not so long ago, in France at least, undergraduate students were exposed very early on to different schools of economic thought. In most departments around the world, this is no longer the case (Blaug 1998). Most courses have the same gray color of neoclassical economics – even if modern textbooks use fancy colors to present it. During private discussions with teachers that publicly opposed our petition, we were surprised to realize that quite a few of them would acknowledge the
validity of our claim. So why did they oppose our protest? Here, social pressure and conformity, widespread diseases as they are within the academy, provide the first reason for this strange behavior. But there is a second reason: the appeal of mainstream economics. Here, I would like to focus on three aspects of mainstream economics which, among others, account for its appeal: its ideology, its scientific nature, and the formal flexibility of its language.
