post-autistic economics review
Issue no. 19, 2 April 2003

issue 19 contents PAE Review index home page

Autisme-Économie Reaches Harvard

The student rebellion against unreality and dogmatism in economics that began in France in June 2000, spreading to Cambridge UK and reverberating around the world, has now erupted at Harvard. In recent weeks over 700 Harvard students and alumni have signed a petition addressed to the Harvard Economics Department asking it to approve a new introductory economics course proposed by Professor Stephen Marglin that would cover “a broader spectrum of views”, “examine the assumptions of economics”, and “challenge students to think critically”.

“The point,” said Marglin to the New York Times (4 March 2003), “is not to substitute one set of biases for another. It’s to provide a more balanced approach.” The Boston Globe (9 March) reported that Marglin’s course would “encourage the critique of mainstream economists’ assumptions” and that Marglin and Samuel Bowles, now at Amherst, first proposed a similar course at Harvard almost 30 years ago. Students, said Bowles to the Globe, would “benefit from knowing that economics, like most sciences, is not a settled doctrine, but a lively and much-debated set of hypotheses.”

Daniel DiMaggio, one of the student leaders of the Harvard reform movement, says that Harvard’s existing introductory course “is fairly ideological, if not completely ideological. We’ve been leafleting it with articles that have a different perspective, but we’ve been hoping that something like this [Marglin’s proposed course] would come along. We’ve had a pretty amazing level of response so far. I’ve been pretty excited about the number of people who have signed [the petition].”

Michael Y. Lee, the petition’s author, says that “there is a strong student demand for an alternative intro economics course. The free market principles that economists worship should also apply to these courses to a certain degree, and right now Ec 10 holds a monopoly on intro courses.”

Benjamin B. Collins, another student, says that his main complaint is not the ideological spin, but rather the apathy. “Students just copy down what’s on the board”, he said. “What excites me about this new class is that Prof. Marglin seems to be really interested in building and teaching a new course that will force students to learn actively. If he succeeds in getting students engaged and thinking critically about not only mainstream economic theory itself, but about the philosophy and history of economics, the problem of bias will fix itself, because students will be forced to think for themselves about economics.”

The Harvard Crimson reports (17 March) that the university’s Undergraduate Council has postponed until April a debate on the proposal for Marglin’s post-autistic introductory course.

Meanwhile the Harvard students have issued a “mission statement”. It includes the following passage, highly reminiscent of the initial petition from the French students.

We believe that the field of economics plays a critical role in shaping the basic organizational structure of society and informing policies (both domestic and international) that strongly affect individual welfare. Because of the practical impact of economics, we believe economics education has important human consequences. Economic models are lenses through which students are taught to view how society should function. We believe that Harvard, by only providing one model of economics, fails to provide critical perspectives or alternative models for analyzing the economy and its social consequences. Without providing a true marketplace for economic ideas, Harvard fails to prepare students to be critical thinkers and engaged citizens. We believe that the values and political convictions inherent within the standard economic models taught at Harvard inevitably influence the values and political convictions of Harvard students and even the career choices that they make. Finally, by falsely presenting economics as a positive science devoid of ethical values, we believe Harvard strips students of their intellectual agency and prevents them from being able to make up their own minds.

The Harvard students’ full manifesto is available here. Students at other universities wishing to launch similar PAE initiatives would do well to consult this document, as well as the French Students’ Open Letter, the Cambridge Students’ Proposal and the international Kansas City Proposal.