Economics Profession

Amid mass unemployment and economic turmoil, instructors who lecture on the superiority of free markets without acknowledging the dysfunction in the wider economy are at risk of appearing out of touch and exacerbating antipathy towards economics.

The Toxic Textbooks movement devotes energy to curriculum reform as well. Its purpose is to galvanize student protests and “encourage schools and universities to use economics textbooks that engage honestly with the real world.”

Yesterday, Harvard students of Ec 10 staged a walkout to draw attention to the bias they detect in the course.

The optimism embedded in the efficient market hypothesis has been one of the main sources of the recent turmoil

The reputation of economics and economists, never high, has been a victim of the crash of 2008.

The future of macro, he says, may well make “the formation and revision of expectations an object of analysis in its own right.”

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 should have been sufficient empirical evidence to indicate that the axiomatic basis of the mainstream theory needs to be replaced.