UCD MA in Economics

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the course.

Sad not to see an international trade option for the second semester though.

OMF,

And while thay are at it, they should study creationism & astrology.

@tull

Evolution is science. Economics is not.

OMF,

These days you can get a pretty good idea of what students are exposed to by looking at their teachers’ web pages. See Karl Whelan’s page for example. If you really are obsessed with maths you’ll be happy as a clam in inky-black mud.

Karl, could you recommend a good book that gives the layman who has interest in Economics but can’t go back to study a good overview of the subject. Thanks

@ ObsessiveMathsFreak

You should read “The Economics Anti-Textbook”. Its not against mainstream methodology, but against mainstream textbooks.

@tull mcadoo, Rob S

You should read “The Economics Anti-Textbook” also. Few things more annoying than someone with a Master’s who then thinks they know it all. There are plenty of mainstream economists like Stiglitz who are against “free-market/deregulation ideology”. Also Marx’s theory has similar predictions to Ricardo’s, plus he made some predictions that can be empirically tested. These predictions failed, but he still made some useful contributions, and you will be surprised how much vocabulary is taken from Marx.

Comparing those who are against “free-market/deregulation ideology” (who include many Nobel prize winners) as flat-earthers or astrologers is just displaying your ignorance of economics.

You idiots who think Marx is somehow on the level of creationism and flat earth theories haven’t been paying attention these last few years. If any theory has been refuted by events in recent times (“swept into the dustbin of history” is, I believe, the preferred way of expressing the idea) it is the laissez-faire free-market low tax, minimal government nonsense of Hayek, Mises and their epigone Milton Friedman.

Pity many on this blog and in government haven’t heard the news.

cf. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n03/benjamin-kunkel/how-much-is-too-much

for a primer.

@Gavin Kostick

Start with that Kunkel review. Read some of the David Harvey stuff or you could follow the videos of his course on Capital, Vol. 1. Add in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Kieran Allen’s Ireland’s Economic Crisis.

The fact that the Marxist or, indeed, any alternative economic perspective to the neoliberal one, is apparently not taught at UCD is part of the phenomenon that some Marxist theorists like Harvey attempt to analyse. This narrowing, based not on some sort of evidence or refutation of Marxism as the fatuous comments above seem to suggest, but entirely on ideology, speaks very poorly of the programme in question.

“Step right up, kids! Learn the techniques that allowed almost all mainstream economists to be entirely blindsided by the crisis (oh, sure, go ahead: cite Morgan Kelly who, not coincidentally, is hardly mainstream)! Learn how, by means of epicycles upon epicycles, we can use the destructive power of capitalism to avoid our own destruction by capitalism! And pay no attention to that bearded man over there in the corner! He believes preposterous things: that markets are not always right, that capitalism cannot continue infinitely, that greed isn’t good and even more absurd claims besides! No, stick with us. We’ll teach you how austerity leads to prosperity!”

Funny how I didn’t see that a thread on the UCD MA programme in economics would quickly develop into a discussion on the merits of Karl Marx .. the wonders of tinternet.

Ah Karl…you should have known!

BTW – unless I’m missing it somewhere obvious, the UCD economics course is an example of non-transparent pricing. I had to wander around the website to eventually find the price lists for postgraduate courses. Nothing on the course page or brochure.

@Enda H

Actually, I have a pretty good idea of what is taught in economics courses and what the discipline does. The point I was making is that economics at UCD rather than being immune or above politics and ideology, is actually infected by it and the absence of any economists from alternative traditions like Marxism is indicative of that. Not coincidentally, none of them (except the guy who works on medieval economics) had an inkling that the great crisis of 2008 was coming and none of them (still!) give any sense that this crisis just might have been systemic in its origins, a crisis of capitalism itself. No, no, capitalism is fine: indeed, that is the sole object (and ideological framework!) for our “discipline.” So it’s not that I think they are actively teaching neoliberal thought: rather, it’s that neoliberalism is the very water they swim in and therefore equally invisible as what it is, namely, an ideology. One need not have spent very much time on this board to get a sense of it, provided one is paying attention.

That the media in this country and the politicians also swim in that water and can’t imagine anything else still doesn’t excuse the academics.

@ KW,

Thanks for advertising the information. If I ever fall into the money I would certainly consider the option of UCD MA. It sounds like a formidable challenge for guys like myself, but it is no harm to have goals and targets in life. BOH.

“the UCD economics course is an example of non-transparent pricing.”

UCD administration refers non transparency. Old habits die hard and obfuscation extends even to course promotion, when any logical person would try and provide information to prospective students.

“To qualify for a place on the MA in Economics a student should normally hold a primary degree with at least Second Class Honours Grade 1 (2H1) in Economics or in another degree that has strong theoretical and quantitative content such as Maths, Physics, Engineering or Computer Science. Alternatively, applicants may hold a Second Class Honours Grade 1 Higher Diploma in Economic Science, or an equivalent qualification noting that a 2H1 corresponds to a 60% average, or a B minus or 3.08 GPA equivalent. ”

That’s me out then. No room for arts students at the inn?

PS Since when was a 2.1 a B- average? In my day it was a B/B+!

@hoganmahew,

But what did you study?

Did you go to one of the NUI colleges/universities?

I think the graduates & students of NUI Arts faculties are about the only ones in the world who when asked ‘what did you study?’, reply with ‘arts’, or (worse still) ‘I just did arts’.
Everywhere else they answer the question they are asked with at least the minimum information expected, i.e. the name of the subjects, and there is a very very wide variation, e.g. ‘English’, ‘Mathematics’, ‘Philosophy’ – all serious heavy duty intellectual subjects if undertaken to a high level in a decent department. Most people would be more impressed with someone with a first class hons in one of those subjects from a good university dept rather than yet another BComm graduate who regurgitated “Porter’s five forces” etc. (in much the same way as Inter Cert Commerce students years earlier they listed off “The advantages and disadvantages of advertising”).

On a related note about academic standards it was good and interesting to see on the 6th April that “Trinity’s School of Engineering has been ranked in the top 100 internationally by the just published 2011 QS World University Rankings. The rankings place TCD as the only Irish institution to make it into the top 100 for Elec Engineering.”

http://www.tcd.ie/Communications/news/news.php?headerID=1742&vs_date=2011-4-1

well that can be a serious heavy duty subject…

as long as it wasn’t in UCD’s old “Combined Departments of History” (both blueshirts AND brownshirts).

just kidding 🙂

Anyone who would merit the degree should be able to make up their own minds on what ism is their cup of tea or none.

There can be no perfectly human operated system and it’s always dangerous when an ideology becomes a religion.

In some areas, deregulation has been positive; in other areas, not.

The brutal system of communism has been comprehensively discredited and ‘Ernie Ball’ raises the question of ‘a crisis of capitalism itself.’

The model of American capitalism where the affluent monopolise most of the economic gains, is not one to be admired and several prominent American economists have published research on this trend

Irish farmers gain from Europe’s biggest protectionist program while the cuts in industrial tariffs have boosted trade and incomes enormously, while it’s mainly developing countries who charge tariffs on each others’ manufacturing exports.

Contrary to the mindset of those who view the word ‘multinational’ as synonymous with the infamous United Fruit Company, US MNCs have mainly been a force for good (both in economic terms and in the way workers are treated) in the world as tariffs fell, even though as John Kenneth Galbraith argues in his 1967 book, ‘The New Industrial State’ that the United States was no longer a free-enterprise society but a structured state controlled by the largest companies.

In the same year, Jean Jacques Servan Schreiber in Le Défi américain (The American Challenge), wrote that: “What threatens us is not a torrent of riches. The war is being fought against us not with dollars, oil, tons of steel or even modern machines, but with creative imagination and a talent for organization.

“What America has done is to change the entire concept of culture, the values of civilization. The new American culture is not Chartres or Versailles, but the organization of talent. The Americans organize intelligence so that it creates. They have an industrial and scientific strategy. That’s real culture.”

There is no perfect world but sustained high growth in developing economies is a recent post-World War II phenomenon and there are common reasons for it.

@ Michael H

I suppose one of the things which distinguished the US from older nations is the extent to which business considerations have undermined most other forms of authority. This tendency was, of course, sometimes for the better, but overall it went too far. As the Mexican writer Octavio Paz put it, the US is a battleground between democracy and plutocracy.

Other People’s Money is a 1914 classic by Louis Brandeis, subsequently a Supreme Court judge. The Pujo Committe established that corrupt and unlawful activities were the norm among the nations most respected bankers. They did it, and still do it, because they get away with it.

The necessary reforms have been subverted on many occasions, with the unfortunate result that the US has lost most of its moral standing worldwide. I believe most thoughtful Americans recognise that. It’s a pity, because there is as you say, enormous talent and creativity there.

The reasons for high growth post WW2 could be debated at length, but we are a long way off thread.

@all

The other Karl has noted a mention or two on this blog at times …

http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2009/09/07/lucey-the-immorality-and-unfairness-of-nama/#comment-15015

Here with Blind Biddy for the rugby – and borrowing her copy of Capital Vol1, Part VII, section f on Ireland. …. facinating stuff …. on the Famine he notes:

“… it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.’

Hey, he wrote this stuff in 1867 ….. the economics of an acre and a PIG …. wow! And Ireland now THE PIG (-; ….. gotta go …

@KW
Must be The Aesthetic Turn!

Had the pleasure of doing the MA Econ at UCD, wrapping up last year with Karl as my thesis advisor. It was an excellent programme, debate and discussion were encouraged throughout and none of the lecturers were lacking in suggestions regarding literature that explained or supported the theories discussed in class. There was no “house view” being pushed and my classmates and I are still debating topics via email to this day. I’m happy to recommend it and I feel I got my money’s worth.

@ Brian Woods

Unless this dispatch is from some remote cave, I guess you have benefited from the conventional system.

When I used to see members of the muttawa religious police (Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice) in Jeddah, getting out of American air conditioned SUVs to enforce the custom of 1,400 years before, I used to think that I would have respect for you people if you had arrived on camels.

@BpW

That’s sort of the point, Brian. If you have to learn all the maths from scratch, then that’s probably _all_ you’ll learn and you won’t have the time to consider the relevance or applicability of a model. Models are just a way to start to think about how things work – reality is a wee bit too complex for most people to hold it in their head in totality at any one time. Not your good self, of course, but regular folk. Economists, and the like.

I’d wager a lot of the current global trouble came from people too caught up in the maths and not stopping to think whether their models were fallible. But a lot of the Irish problems came from another group of people without the faintest whiff of a model for how the economy works.

If both had ended up somewhere in the middle of the spread, things would probably be a darn sight better now. As the Zen Buddhists – and the econometricians – might answer: Mu.

The mu remark reminds me of a bad old Eng joke.

Two cats on an inclined plane. Which one slips first?

Anyway, Maths isn’t reality, but the shorthand it gives you is vital if you want to describe things accurately and – above all – briefly.

@ Michael H

‘I used to think that I would have respect for you people if you had arrived on camels’

Your BS detector is woking. As Solzhenitsyn said, a communist plumber could always get along with a capitalist one, it was the party apparatchiks who were full of crap. Every totalitiarian regime has its ideological police.

There is a global struggle over resources. Many so called developing countries are the creation of western business interests. One way to keep down nationalism or communism is to promote religious fundamentalism.
Try Octavio Paz ‘One earth: four or five worlds’ for a nice analysis of how the oil business helpd to create the Iranian religious regime. We reap what we sow.

Like Sadam, the jihadis were backed to the hilt by western interests, until they started to become a problem for the west. Now they are the axis of evil, but the last time I looked, it was the communists who were the enemy. Of course they were, but they had no monoply on evil.

As the American general is reputed to have said, ‘I have seen the enemy, gentlemen, and it is us’.

Anything on Hyman Minsky or Kondratiev(?) never mind Marx? What about Irving Fischer? We are in the middle of debt deflation and we allow/justify banks to steal an unprecedented proportion of our future production, where’s the work on this?

And on Marx, he did say that the major input in all products was labour (even a commodity like copper in the ground has zero value, until labour transforms it into something useful), so oligopolies/monopolies/competitive markets tend to have no effect on capital, instead structures that introduce competition, only introduce more pressure on the price of labour, but less downward pressure on returns to capital

This was an excellent discussion. Thank you all.

@all

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/op_6.pdf

Minsky’s view of Banking and Capitalism in America

[one page MA on Minsky … if and when I find time … must try to figure him out ………

To have ‘no formal training in economics’ is, imho, a distinct advantage in these times – I commenced me “economics” ‘learning’ in late 2008, much of it on this blog and the rest in the everyday – and as we both may appear to have open minds …….. progress may be possible. Of course, having lived, I will have tacit if vulgar understanding of ‘political economy’ – my preferred name for what may be a discipline, or even a social science if one could place ‘power’ somehow into all those eloquent equations …

So how we doin on the selves-learnin …?

When bust – go bust quick – then get on with recovery.

Must say I agree with your interpretation of Minsky’s (b) …… bit late but it still needs doin! And then a few Minskite local banks under pragmatic citizen boards … and a good bit of leuderamadan fat that can be cut from we know where to get them started ………. (-;

Now where do we find another good one-pager …. ?

@ Bklyn_rntr: “Government should enter the economy with infrastructure investment and employment maximizing public sector investment once the bust has happened. It should not try to prevent the collapse because that is impossible.”

Gov is just a bunch of transient politicians. Who do be there ALL the time?

Most econs have an economic Model-in-Use in their heads (DO’D gave out to me about this, and I think he may have a point) and this is what guides their behaviours (what they say). Gov actually means the taxpayer (Govs have no money of their own). So in effect you are indulging in social welfare transfer payments to whichever sector. These transfers create nothing. What might happen, is that one sector uses the transfers as collateral to get credit. Credit is an essential ingredient for the aggregate expansion of economic activity (fossil fuel energy is the other).

Our current predicament is that both these ingredients are sort of on the short side. The other issue is debt repayment – for those who can afford it. When debt and money collide, money is destroyed => deflation. That’s why we have those QE binges: keep the money (credit supply) afloat. Its a mad scramble to keep the Ponzi scheme airborne. Works fine until the citizen taxpayer figures out that if they spend less, and work less, Ponzi deflates real fast. We might just be getting to this transition phase. First Q of 2012?

BpW

Bw…I don’t know about destroyed…it is destroyed in the sense of purchasing power, but that can happen through inflation (less good for same money) or through massive deflation (same price for goods but less money in circulation) …it seems clear that inflation is the preferred route but this can never be openly acknowledged. that would represent a peek behind the wizard’s curtain and is too dangerous to contemplate.

We do have an energy problem and we have a money problem and maybe we are in the last phase of a western hegemony problem. for centuries, a stable financial system depended upon a system that was operated and administered by the creditor (Italian republics, holland UK). today, we are in a system operated by the debtor, with all of the moral hazard that this implies. In 50 years will we still have a system operated by debtors? And if so what possible ideology can be created to justify the irresponsibility that such as system invites. Also, can the West ( that’s us) even contemplate the possibility that the world’s financial center of gravity would shift east and south? I can’t see it. We have to either become creditors again (extremely painful) or we resist the natural shift of power that accompanies a shift in financial flows (a real disaster on par with the 1914 to 1945 period in Europe)…anyway I need alcohol now

@all

Another One-Pager for the MA (optional – History of Political Economy)

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/26/176.html

@Karl Whelan
Now look what you’ve started (-;

@ DO’D: Your right! You didn’t ‘give out’ to me. Scolded? No, matter. However, you did pose me a question. Havn’t forgotton. No meaningful answer yet.

I have this mindset that sez, “You MUST have some reason – mad or otherwise, for your behaviours”

But does one actually recognize or even tap into that mindset to ascertain what one is doing is congruent with one’s embedded belief system? Sadly, the answer to that would appear to be, on the whole, No! Yours truly also. Really need to watch that. Hard to digest some of the awful pap that I encounter.

Thanks for comment, and Bklyn_rntr too. I’ll give Minsky a shot when I get some ‘free time’.

BpW

@all

Justin O’Brien in Today’s IT

Economics requires the injection of new thinking from disciplines as varied as political science, law and ethics. The elevation of behavioural economics, a rag-tag of concepts drawn from these disciplines but not integrated within a coherent and cohesive program, demonstrates the enormity of the challenge. …. There is a pressing need for new economic thinking. It cannot take place in a vacuum. For economics to save itself it must accept reintegration with the other social sciences and the humanities. It necessitates not only a return to the political economy of JM Keynes. It necessitates a return to the agenda advanced by Adam Smith, himself a professor of jurisprudence at Glasgow, which measures progress not only on efficiency but on the strength of moral communities. Contemporary economics has much to relearn.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0411/1224294394466.html

The World is Inter-Disciplinary ….. (-;

@Rory O’Farrell

“Thinks they know it all” would be an exaggeration on your part for the sake of sensationalism.

I apologise if the joke sounded dismissive but we all have our own opinions. I just feel that the what is currently taught is not as one-dimensional as implied.

@Rob S

I agree that at Master’s level its not so one dimensional (using matrices it is R-dimensional :D). One thing people can take from The Economics Anti-Textbook is the broad range of opinions within mainstream research (though omitted from mainstream undergrad textbooks).

I did a business undergrad, not economics. But looking at many courses I think they would benefit from some sort of history of economic thought. Its entirely possible that economic theory goes down some dead ends from time to time, and needs to back-up a bit. For example, 30/40 years ago the Cambridge Capital controversy basically showed we can’t measure capital. This is relevant to lots of empirical literature. However I didn’t find it mentioned in textbooks and I had to read it from economic history books in my own time.

Upthread, paulr posed a question which deserves an answer but I don’t think it got one: “could you recommend a good book that gives the layman who has interest in Economics but can’t go back to study a good overview of the subject.” Since Karl Whelan hasn’t responded here’s my suggestion (well worth what it’s costing you).

No single book does the job. Better to tackle micro, macro and applied separately. Varian’s Intermediate Microeconomics, despite the title, can be read without any prior knowledge. For applied economics, Krugman’s books are excellent, especially The Age of Diminished Expectations, The Accidental Theorist and The Return of Depression Economics.

Once you’ve read those, with a bit of help from Google to flesh out anything that’s puzzling you, tackle Keynes, the master of macro. Skidelsky’s biography is terrific, and much of Essays in Persuasion is beautifully written – worth it for the prose alone.

@ David, Kevin and others.

On the suggestions here I went off and looked a bit a Minsky. I note with, slightly guilty, interest that on his wikipedia page it states: “Minsky stated his theories verbally, and did not build mathematical models based on them. Consequently, his theories have not been incorporated into mainstream economic models.”

This reminded me a bit of a book I read once on 19th century bridge building. Essentially, there were two schools of thought, the British and the French. The British tended to be arch pragmatists and build according to what had not fallen down the last time. Consequently, like the Romans and Normans before them, they tended towards massively over-engineering to be safe, and therefore – like the lovely bridges over the Menai straights – many of them stood the test of time. (With notable exceptions!)

The French, however, were more mathematical in their approach. On paper, this meant that they made better use of materials, but frequently ‘real world’ issues did not play out as predicted and/or the models were too simplistic, and consequently far more of them fell down.

@ Gavin Kostick

I reckon you could have a fairly successful academic career by taking heterodox ideas, formalising them mathematically, and then publishing them in mainstream journals (giving appropriate credit of course).

@Rory O’Farrell

Can you name three ‘heterodox’ academic economists with successful careers in Ireland?

@David O’Donnell

That depends on how you define heterodox and successful.

@ D O’D
The neocons are not the neoliberals, although perhaps Friedman, painfully, is a link.
Question remains, why is Mises hated AND ignored? It’s weird.
Anyway, the freedom juggernaut is rolling. Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” presents evidence that trade is central to human evolution. Trade may even have been the driver of the evolution of theory of mind, something even chimpanzees don’t have. Jared Diamond in “The Third Chimpanzee” gives evidence that modern humans seem to be descended from harem-based societies where the dominant male was much bigger than the females, and very violent. When we try to enforce socialism, or indeed wage war to try to spread democracy, imo, we are creating the environment for alpha males to dominate.
Evolutionary biology is forcing “bottom-up” thinking in everything: see Dennett’s “decentralized” theory of consciousness, atheists’ and feminists’ growing interest in libertarianism and Hayek’s work on spontaneous order.
Marx, remember, dedicated Das Kapital to Darwin, but of course, we now know that the unit of evolution is the gene, not the organism, and certainly not the species or race or class.
The title “The Origin of Species” reflects the title “The Wealth of Nations”. Both contain the seeds of the disastrous habit of thinking about people as collectives of one sort or another.
Re one-pagers, there’s this link to the text of Keynes’ disgraceful 1936 preface to the German edition of his “General Theory”.
http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/foregt.html
“The theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. “

@Karl – greatly improved course on the 1991 vintage. I’d have been quite proud to have spent a year doing your one.

@Rothbard

If Mises is hated – he cannot be ignored!

How do I put this gently? Let’s say you requested a consultation with Freud – and he suggested that you might be better off seeing Jung. Then you requested a consultation with Jung – and he suggested that you might be better off seeing Freud.

Then you requested a consultation with Decartes and he replies: ‘I can’t help you – I’m as mortally afflicted with the illusions of the abstract individualist philosophy of consciousness as you are – we are both neanderthals, and doomed to lonely extinction.’

That said, if it helps with your ontological sense of insecurity, and if it does no damage to the Other whom you are incapable of recognising, then do continue with those individualist illusions in company with all the free_dumb lovin aliens in the fox_newz dominated world. Throw an odd tea-party, whatever turn you on …

btw the local chimps take exception to your reference to the non-state of their minds – nuff said!

… actually found a few! And a book … and UCD students probably reading it …(hard to know which frightens me more – reading a book by Moore McDowell or a Tome by Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi) & fairly roight-roight-roight-wing tink-tanks (no thanks!). but if you have an academic journal list I’d appreciate it …….. but then this is Richard Tol’s usual area ……….

But, yes, looks like we may have different interpretations of ‘heterodoxy’ … more the merrier ……… certain levels of heterodoxy are healthy in any system – and based on recent empirical events, looks like political economy (here and everywhere) was somewhat lacking in such a doxy ….

Got a one-pager on Kalecki?

@Rory O’Farrell

Ta for the link. As noted above, I’m simply brushing up on one of my weaker dimensions – but an all-round appreciation of divergent views is good in any branch of human or social science. The so-called maximising rational individual in supreme isolated abstract space is one of the most dangerous constructions to be encounted in social or human science. It does not exist anywhere in human space – it’s a flawed, if useful, abstraction – but, in certain ideological hands, as dangerous as the bubonic plague.

Before being let loose on econometrics, a grounding in Heidegger’s world, Wittgenstein’s Language Games, and Habermas’ take on the one-sidedness of ‘instrumental rationality’ would not go astray, imho. Economists might then think about fitting equations to the people in the world, as distinct from trying to fit people to abstract equations whose beauty is purely mathematical – the latter being some of the most fundmentalist. There is also the minor issue of the incapability of mathematics to address meaning, and the neglect of hermeneutics in favour of pristine mathematical explanatics. Real life needs a pragmatic bit of both.

Now, if you think selecting Moore McDowell as your No 1 HeteroDox Pick will enhance your UCD career prospects ……… well, what can I say … your selection just blew me away ………. (-; If Moore_een is the No 1 HeteroDox …….. the end is definitely roight nigh … or maybe you are winding me up with a little irony due to The Aesthtetic Turn …. even Colm McCarthy is dabbling at the mo ….

@David

You wrote: “As noted above, I’m simply brushing up on one of my weaker dimensions – but an all-round appreciation of divergent views is good in any branch of human or social science.”

Couldn’t agree more. But the fact that it’s impossible to come up with the name of even one left-wing Irish academic economist says all you need to know about the balance of perspectives in Irish Economics Departments. All of the economists in them are working under the assumption that capitalism is the system to be understood, the only (possible) system. Even if, pace Karl Whelan, some of them are interested in some of the “problems” or “inequities” of capitalism, none of them are investigating the possibility that capitalism itself might be the problem, that it is predicated on an obvious impossibility (limitless growth in a finite world) that is also an immorality.

@ Ernie

“it’s impossible to come up with the name of even one left-wing Irish academic economist says all you need to know about the balance of perspectives in Irish Economics Departments”

Who says it’s impossible? Who did you ask? What’s your definition of left-wing? Does it have to involve thinking Karl Marx is very important rather than pointing to all the failures of capitalism that we teach every day as part of the syllabus?

For what it’s worth, it’s generally considered that in the US, academic economists are predominantly left-leaning
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w4q363786573275h/

@Karl Whelan

Whom would you recommend? And we are discussing Ireland here – and picking up a bit of economics on the blog on the side ……..

Name one: refute the proposition.

All of the economists [in Irish Economics Departments] them are working under the assumption that capitalism is the system to be understood, the only (possible) system.

That’s a very sweeping claim. Presumably you have done a search and found nobody making any other assumption. Was the search very thorough? Did it include Kevin O’Rourke’s work? I haven’t read Power and Plenty, but it’s hard to believe that a history of the last thousand years of world trade was written under the assumption that capitalism is the system to be understood, the only (possible) system.

@all

Comment 100. Ta for the tutorials ….