09/13/2016
“The steps needed to bring economics teaching into the real world do not require the invention of anything new or exotic,” Anwar Shaikh says, quoting a September 2014 editorial in the Financial Times: “The curriculum should embrace economic history and pay more attention to unorthodox thinkers such as Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and, yes, even Karl Marx. Faculties need to restore links with other fields such as psychology and anthropology, whose insights can explain phenomena that economics cannot. Economics professors should make the study of how people act the starting point of courses, not an afterthought.”
For the better part of a generation, the world’s economic system has been dominated by libertarian free market theory—a theory that promotes small government, deregulation, and a host of other conservative ideas. However, the way Anwar Shaikh, chair of the Economics Department at The New School for…