Yet, to those who have been inside the trenches of the battle for the soul of economics, Reinhart’s indignant reaction was symptomatic of the profound problems that have been plaguing the profession for decades — problems which our group had traveled to the Boston conference to challenge.

Over the preceding few days of this gathering of “dismal scientists”, we had stoked our fair share of controversy by waging a “meme war” throughout the conference space: we projected billboard-sized witticisms from the likes of John Maynard Keynes and Herman Daly on the side of the Sheraton; plastered the walls, bathroom stalls and elevator cars with subversive posters; distributed our manifesto outside of lectures; and attended panels to speak truth directly to the faces of other orthodox high-priests like Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw. In the hallways and lounges you could overhear scraps of conversations regarding our action — some supportive, some smugly condescending and others utterly bemused at this rare display of activism in the midst of such an otherwise dour professional gabfest.

But nothing we had experienced could compare to Reinhart’s reaction.

Seeing Paul Krugman’s critical words projected on the wall, she stormed out from behind the lectern to patronizingly scold us, exclaiming that “this was an academic forum” where such protests were “out of line.” We reminded her that as students of economics, we felt an obligation to speak truth to power on such issues, especially when she was embarking on an even more complex study of the same subject. Yet, as she had done when the scandal over her paper broke in 2013, she dismissed the disturbance and moved on without a shred of humility.

To those who know the backstory on this dust up, Reinhart’s reaction should be cause for concern, if not surprise. In 2010, Reinhart, a Harvard economist, published a paper with her colleague Ken Rogoff which found a correlation between high levels of public debt and sharply declining economic performance. By the time a graduate student from Amherst discovered egregious flaws in Reinhart’s data and upended the paper’s conclusions, the damage had already been done: conservative austerity hawks had glommed on to the paper’s findings to justify massive cut backs in government spending at a time when stimulus and the social safety net were needed most. Yet despite the firestorm of criticism this ignited, then as now, no mea culpa was forthcoming from Reinhart. Instead she and her colleague dismissed the whole thing as a mere “kerfuffle.”

Of course, Reinhart and Rogoff are hardly unique for their dangerous unapologetic arrogance. Unfortunately, their resistance to humility and reflexive critical thought is an endemic trait within the world of mainstream economics, and one that has been on full display in the wake of the most devastating economic crisis in half a century. Though widely condemned in the press and public for their failure to foresee the advent or in many cases even the possibility of the financial meltdown, with few exceptions, in their journals, and lecture halls, mainstream neoclassical economists have continued to toe the same narrow intellectual line that led us into this mess.

Indeed, even where the high priests of the economic orthodoxy have amended their views, they appear to do so with an eye to covering up their epic failures.

Nowhere was this strategy more evident at the AEA than in former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers’ talk on the roots of the continuing economic downturn. Though Summers was one of the primary cheerleaders for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall banking regulations in 1999, and fought derivatives market regulations tooth and nail, his talk entirely omitted any reference to these proximate causes of the 2008 credit crisis, focusing instead on a theory of long term stagnation in investment. When we demanded that Summers speak to his personal role in the crisis, we were met with a contemptuous silence on his part. (One of Summers’ more zealous acolytes in the audience even attempted to intimidate me with a vicious stare that must have lasted half a minute after I’d asked my question.)

Coupled with Reinhart’s “academic forum” remark, the hostility we experienced goes right to the heart of the strategic importance of the type of student activism #KickItOver brought to the AEA. At this conference, as in other high profile professional forums for economics, mainstream elites stifle dissent from outside the upper echelons of the orthodoxy by strictly policing the “legitimate” avenues for expressing dissent. The upshot of the “academic forum” remark is that any challenges that do not come in the form of a research paper are illegitimate. Never mind that the AEA gathering, like the profession in general, is an ideologically segregated space. Here, true academic debate among disparate schools of thought is a rarity. Not only do mainstream panels at the conference tend to exclude perspectives from outside the orthodox neoclassical framework, but the mainstream and heterodox panels take place in entirely different hotels. So good luck directly challenging the likes of Reinhart with your critical research paper. Indeed, good luck getting it aired in any of the influential mainstream publications — particularly, the AEA’s journals which have seen a marked decline in debate between competing schools of thought in recent decades.

To play by the officially sanctioned rules of debate in this milieu is to effectively preempt the possibility of revolution within the profession. It is only by stepping outside the bounds of the discourse of the thought police that rebel economists can hope to regain a voice in the conversation. In a profession where many of the most influential mainstream voices see their work as objective science, being beyond politics or ideology, efforts to re-politicize the discourse as we did at the AEA are inherently subversive. Rethinking economics requires re-politicizing economics. Political disruptions shift the battlefield from a place where the elites hold the advantage (on the field of faux-scientific formalism) to one where revolutionaries hold the advantage (in the field of politics). Indeed, this is precisely the shift that Robert Heilbroner called for in the quote we projected on the side of the Sheraton: “Before economics can progress, it must abandon its suicidal formalism.” Most importantly, politicization opens up a critical space for an important revolutionary demographic to enter the debate: students. No professional letters or publications are required for students to know they deserve a robust, pluralist economics education — one that offers them the breadth of theoretical perspectives and methodologies they need to tackle the great crises of the 21^st century.

Though it is hard to get a clear read on the true impact of such guerilla protests, within days it became apparent that our scrappy little group had in fact helped to shift the conversation in some appreciable way. From the Washington Post profile of the initiative, to a critical piece from Bloomberg, to a supportive article in US News & World Report, our actions were very much at the center of the media chatter over the event. Whether they dismissed our actions or praised them, these articles and more emphasized an aura of resurgent debate and controversy around the conference. Politics was creeping back into the discourse of the AEA, went the narrative, exactly as we had intended it.

As we heard again and again from heterodox economists and other supportive voices in Boston, an economic student rebellion has been too long coming, and the AEA Meme War was another hopeful sign that a pluralist spring could be right around the corner. But neoclassicism’s empire of thought is considerable, and breaking its stranglehold over academic free inquiry requires that students take the types of tactics we pioneered in Boston and replicate them on campus after campus and in conference after conference, until the economics discourse is re-politicized and liberated on a massive scale. It is to this broader effort of disruption and transformation that the rebel economists at #KickItOver plan to shift our efforts in the wake of the AEA. From the establishment of a campus network, to calls for national and international student walkout days and pluralist teach-ins, we’ll continue to scale up our efforts until the noise we make is loud enough to wake up the profession from its decades long neoclassical coma.

— Keith Harrington

[The] study finds that, compared to other social scientists, economists consider themselves elites, smarter than others, not needing to explore outside their discipline, worthy of being listened to first when it comes time to fix things; and this view may actually be accepted those other social scientists, who place themselves and their disciplines at the fringe looking in. Other findings suggest that a dominant view, or party line, is more widely shared within Economics than in other social sciences. It is enforced by a more strict hierarchy and by a narrower control group, associated with elite institutions. Prestige and compensation may ratify economists’ standing in the profession as much as competence or demonstrable results.

This narcissistic exceptionalism and dogmatic thought-policing not only severs cross-disciplinary connections to other social sciences but stifles debate within the profession itself. That’s the finding of the other recent study by Welsh researcher Joe Francis. Francis tracked the incidence of debate over a ninety-year period between scholars in the “big five” economic journals – two of which are American Economic Association publications. Using search terms such as “comment” “reply” or “rejoinder,” Francis found that the number of articles containing such terms declined dramatically since the 1960s – from over 20% in 1968 to just 2% in 2010. Unsurprisingly, Francis traces this decline to the marginalization Marxian and Keynesian thought by the mainstream during the neoclassical and neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1970s.

That’s essentially the question that heterodox economics professor Julie Matthaei and I put to a lecturer from the infamous University of Chicago economics program and a libertarian professor from the Koch-funded George Mason University during a debate on Al Jazeera’s program The Stream yesterday. Their answer — that we in fact should open our economics programs and journals up to pluralist debate — might surprise you. Then again, it might not. After all, it’s hard to sound reasonable while arguing against intellectual openness, and its even harder to pose as a supporter of the “free market” when you oppose a free market of ideas in your very own classroom.

Of course without action it’s all empty rhetoric. So who’s down to help us make some real headway at these bastions of right-wing thought and bring the Battle for the Soul of Economics to Friedman and Koch territory?

Meanwhile check out and share the video of the show. (NOTE: Viewers in the United States must add the free and trusted Hola plugin to their browsers and choose a country such as the UK to bypass a regional viewing restriction.)

Besides inspiring the heterodox and pluralist communities with a vision of a refreshingly subversive approach to transforming the profession, we also succeeded in putting the high priests of the orthodoxy on the defensive.

You could hear it in the incredulous mutterings of the neoclassical faithful as they stood, bemusedly staring at the accusations of the Kick It Over manifestos we had taped to walls throughout the conference space. You could see it in the eyes of an audience member who mad-dogged me for a good 30 seconds after I challenged former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to explain his role in fueling the financial meltdown.  We had rattled their academic silos, and the experience of such a direct challenge to their authority was disconcerting.

Why else would Greg Mankiw devote the entirety of his only blog update from the conference to a distorted recounting of the jam we pulled off in his lop-sided panel discussion on Thomas’ Piketty’s Capital? Mankiw, you may recall, is the conservative Harvard economist whose gleeful defense of obscene wealth inequality prompted a mass walkout of students from his own ec 10 introductory economics course at Harvard in 2011. Though we stuck to substantive critiques of Mankiw’s bizarre arguments for inequality (including a claim that the Occupy movement did not oppose wealth concentration!), Mankiw opted to frame our actions as a personal attack, lumping us together with a conspiratorial heckler who allegedly asked him how much the Koch Brothers were paying him. Yet, as shown in the video below, though our critiques may have been provocative, they were never puerile. Leave it to a neoclassical economist to ignore all the data that doesn’t fit his model.

While we clearly struck a nerve among the neoclassical crowd, we also struck a chord among those with a more progressive mindset. From the folks who came up to congratulate and thank us after our session jams, to the steady stream of praise from pluralist luminaries like James Galbraith and Steve Keen, there was a clear sense of excitement that, as one student commented “finally someone has begun to speak straight into the face” of the establishment.

None of this would have been possible were it not for the group of student activists who showed the exceptional courage to attend those sessions, stand up and shout their outrage over the narrowness of the orthodoxy into the faces of its high priests. Thanks to Anirban, Aparna, Dustin, Jess, Kevin, Mike and Sonia for your inspiring example to the ranks of other student rebels who are bound to follow you into this new battle for the soul of economics.

Photos courtesy of Kyle Depew, The Illuminator Collective

Photo credit: Kyle Depew
Projection by The Illuminator 

This January, the rebel economists at Adbusters will head to the American Economic Association conference in Boston to throw off some much-needed sparks. As the largest annual gathering of economists in the U.S., and a magnet for media attention, the AEA conference is the perfect location to light brush fires in people’s minds, stoke debate, and inspire new flare ups of campus activism. From the workshops to the hallways, we’ll shake things up and challenge the dead-end status-quo with the subversive memes and mind-bombs of a new pluralist economics for the 21^st century. We’re looking for a few good rebel economists – from students, to educators and beyond – to join in the fun!

Here are the details:

WHAT: Meme Wars at the AEA Conference
WHEN: Saturday, January 3 – Monday, January 5, 2015
WHERE: Sheraton Hotel, Boston, MA
WHO: Economics students, educators, researchers and rabble-rousers. This will be a economic student-led action, but you don’t need economic credentials to participate; you should have a passion for economic thought and the drive to liberate it from the mainstream stranglehold.
REGISTRATION: Visit the conference website to register, and then sign up below to join the Adbusters contingent.

• Students with college/university IDs: $45
  
• Regular attendees:  $115

SCHOLARSHIPS: Adbusters will provide a limited number of needs-based registration stipends for students who require it, as well as travel stipends for participants travelling from points in the mid-Atlantic, New England, and Southeast Canada. We will also help to find free housing for those who require accommodation assistance. 
RSVP: For more information, or to sign up to join the Adbusters contingent, contact Keith Harrington: keith@adbusters.org. To ensure smooth planning and preparation, please register for the conference and check in with Keith no later than 12/23/14.

If economic growth is supposed supposed to make everyone better off, how do you explain the dramatic rise in income and wealth inequality over the last 30 years?

As, Thomas Piketty explains in a recent talk on his best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the orthodox response is to chalk the income problem up to shifts in “supply and demand for skills.” In other words, the rise in demand for higher-skilled labor in developed countries has left those without access to top-tier education to languish in economic limbo while skilled workers race further and further ahead. It’s nothing but the market at work.

But before you join the cohorts of those ready to swallow such blatant reductionism, you’d do well to listen to Piketty’s talk at the New School. In the talk as well as the book, Piketty draws on meticulously collected data to provide an unsurprisingly more complex explanation which places the inner workings of capitalism itself squarely in the crosshairs.

It’s hardly the standard textbook take on things. But as Piketty so wisely admonishes his audience, one should “be careful with economic textbooks.”

Take a look at the talk and share your thoughts: