“A high level of conformity in academic institutions makes it difficult for economists to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.”

Hmm lets see.

The world’s most presing problem on the environmental-economic interface is climate change/global warming caused by carbon dioxide and other warming gases.

Economists have made major contributions to the debate ... Warwick Mckibbon, Nicholas Stern, Ross Garnault advocating rapid policy action.

Economists can explain why it is happening: emitting carbon dixoide is free, so corporations and individuals choose technology with large external costs. And how to fix it: put a cost on carbon and other warming gases.

Why blame economists for the weakness of politicians and the collective greed of individuals?

Alex,
Nothing against you personally but here goes:
At the heart of the problem is human greed, ably promoted at every turn by an economic imperitive of “growth”. When we, the sceptical, targeted, over-governed, “consumers” stop spending, what do we hear from the media? Growth is slowing, we are about to have a recession, woe is us blah, blah, blah. It is all couched in terms of the economy, and as we have been so poorly educated, economy= economists. When we educate ourselves and discover there are actually differing paradigms of economics al la Friedman and Keynes, we should properly, I believe, question whether it is a science we are dealing with, or a belief system.
I blame economists, not for greed or stupidity, but for failing to recognise, (in spite of the benefit of an expensive education) that the current economic system is anything other that a complete load of bollocks and is destined to end in tears.

re: Eagle Eye,

I would have to agree that economics is part art, part science and part belief system. At one level you have a set of tools to describe what is happening and what mechanisms are available to address identified problems, at another you have an emphasis on free private markets as the solution to every problem.

The reason why these are confused i.e writers attack ‘economists’ rather than ‘laissez-faire economists’ is because of the absence of a clearly described alternative after the fall of communism.

There is the potential for alternative models of cooperation and achieving self-actualisation (e.g open-source software, wikipedia and sea-changing) rather than authoritarian central planning or money-based markets, but this has not yet been brought together into a coherent economic political message that can be communicated ... All parties are scratching around to describe a post-industrial economy with little success.

The problem is that without a clear alternative ideology there is nothing to challenge the legitimacy of vested interests corrupting public decision-making with corporate objectives - the what is good for Gunns is good for Tasmania argument.

Economics simply describes a system for matching resources with needs - with the dominant paradigm currently being voluntary cooperation based on financial incentives. This is descriptive, if it changes I’m sure economists will use their expensive education to describe whatever replaces it, but I wouldn’t loose sleep waiting for the revolution.

PS: I would suggest that the focus on growth stems from the desire to minimise unemployment, this being both a human concern and historically, a key issue in combatting the political threat of communism.

Alex:
Thanks for your response. I see where you are coming from with your comment re communism as a driver for the growth argument, but I suspect that it could be taken back to a greed issue with very little effort, to whit, Communism was resisted so vigorously by the west beacuse the western “democracies” have always been dominated by capitalist (rich) individuals whose primary interest is in maintaining a system that suits their need to continually aquire wealth in the form of money, property, and coercive power.

As for the revolution, I suspect it may not be concious act that brings the current paradigm undone, but an instinctive response to a series of events that leave it revealed for what it has become, a feeding frenzy of growth obcessed, ethically challenged, greedy fools whoes parents failed to teach the meaning of “enough”

Democracy and price-based markets work well together because they both aggregate complex information and enable or force adjustment in processes while preserving property rights, the fundamental issue that concerns the “capitalist (rich) individuals” you mentioned.

With democracy, when a government has bad policies, rather than have a violent uprising, we have an election which changes political power but preserves the allocation of wealth.

With markets, when a system is unsustainable ... oil consumption, or the asset leverage investment model, eventually the markets identify and respond, changing ownership of assets, production methods etc, but preserving the market system as a whole. Thus we see ‘market reality’ catching up with Gunns’ poor management, eventually.

The comparison would be Russia, where Putin isn’t able to retire because the oligarchs fear whoever might replace him will destroy them in the same way Putin destroyed Khordokovsky. The lack of a rule of law prevents peaceful transfer of power, so Putin appoints Medvedev as pseudo-President to preserve the illusion of constitutionality.

On markets you can see the disaster that is awaiting developing countries that subsidise fuel. Import bills and deficits are exploding, while demand surges, but in attempting to unwind the subsidies they create social uproar.

The virtue of markets and democracy is that they support evolution over revolution. Something that is already happening if you read Affluenza and Growth Fetish by Clive Hamilton.