Succinct subject criticism

«The Norwegian universities today educate economy students to obsessive calculator heads.» This is how the attacks fly in this well written confrontation with main currents in economics.

Even though he studied economics during the worst financial crisis since the 1930ies the author Roman Linn Berg Eliassen learned more about mathematical problem solving with abstract models than about the real economic problems existing outside the university. He believes this reflects a fundamental problem with the methodology of the subject. In Hush, we are calculating, he advocates no less than a scientific revolution: «Economists have to lift their heads from formula booklet and ask how the real economy looks like, and adapt their methods to the object they are investigating.»

Despite the polemical tone, and even though the book is published by leftist Manifesto, Hush is not a political pamphlet. Rather, it is a science-philosophical debate post. What Eliassen calls for is realism and pluralism: economics must be based in the real existing economy and accommodate different theoretical perspectives that can throw different light on economic phenomena. The book is thus independent from political sympathies.

As an alternative to the dominating, «neoclassical» paradigm of the subject, the author points to John Maynard Keynes and later economists who have been inspired by him, but also to «Austrian» economists like Friedrich A. Hayek on the opposite political side. These various «heterodox» economists have in common that they do not abstract from uncertainty and vicissitudes that characterizes the real economy, as the neo classicists do with their static equilibrium models – all according to Eliassen. To allow such alternative perspectives into the curriculum and in academic journals will make future economists more critical and reality-oriented, he hopes. Eliassen lays out his points both precise and succinct with knowledge and enthusiasm.

The criticism towards the homogeneity and formula fixation in economics is not original, but Eliassen nevertheless underestimates his own contribution by reviewing it as «just an echo from the underground of economic theory.» An echo is unclear; Eliassen lays out his points both precise and succinct with knowledge and enthusiasm. Assessing whether his argument is valid, I'll leave to the economists. It would please me to read a defence of economics that objectively and with open mind meets Eliassen’s criticism. Critical debate of the kind Shh invites is something we need more of.