Following his earlier op-ed The Los Angeles Times invites INET Senior Editor and Director of Communications Eric J. Weiner to respond to comments that the student movement against orthodox economics is just another case of “a little rejection and rebellion.”
Not so, Weiner says. The movement for new economic thinking is “an ongoing challenge to an entrenched belief system that is wrong and needs to change.”
The ideas students are rebelling against are “at the heart of the economic structure we have today, which has resulted in disastrous financial bubbles that occur with increasing frequency, unprecedented inequality both in the U.S. and around the world, and extreme environmental degradation.”
And it’s not just young students who aren’t well versed in economics that are rebelling. Weiner cites the strident support of a large group of “young scholars” who traveled to INET’s recent Berlin conference to participate in the parallel event hosted by INET’s Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) called the YSI Commons. They were mostly “graduate students, doctoral candidates working on their dissertations, postdoctoral researchers, and young faculty members [who are light years from introductory courses,” Weiner writes. “And they too are eager to break through the wall of the economic orthodoxy.”
And the movement for new economic thinking also enjoys substantial support from established and well-known individuals within the economics profession. The INET Advisory Board includes 6 Nobel laureate economists - such as Joseph Stiglitz, whom Weiner quotes in the article - who are all working hard to get beyond the old, stale ideas of the economic orthodoxy and create a renewed, more open, and more diverse economics discourse. And they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to INET’s quickly growing global community of new economic thinkers.
The goal is nothing less than “a new conventional wisdom in economics that is less focused on elegant theories that can be proven wrong with our eyes and is more reflective of society’s messy reality.”
The revolution is here to stay. And economics – and the world - will be better for it.
