ECONOMICS AT A CROSSROADS?

“The economics profession has become [more] insular and status-obsessed, and not focused enough on making a positive impact on the world.” David Deming

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist [or both].” Kenneth Boulding

“We analyze the institutional clustering of award-winning researchers. We collect nearly 300,000 annual education and career affiliations of nearly 6,000 award-winning researchers across 18 major academic fields in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences. All fields, except for economics, exhibit a low and decreasing concentration, which suggests a trend toward decentralized knowledge production. Conversely, economics shows a high and rising concentration…. Addressing institutional concentration is crucial, because the formation of elite echelons in various aspects of science, from publication records to institutional ties, could potentially stifle creativity and innovation.” Richard B. Freeman, et.al.

“A University Economics Degree today is more of a lobotomy than an education”. Steve Keen

“Page after page of professional economic journals is filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions”. Wassily Leontief

“An economist is someone who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing” Anonymous