highly-educated peers

The benefits and necessity of an education, especially higher education, remain oversold for what they are: a transfer of wealth and a way to ensure class stratification.    And the massive ineptitude of professional economists, all of whom have degrees, many from elite schools, only proves the massive failure of an increasing systemization of so-called learning. Like vegetables without vitamins, our colleges are grinding out people on an industrial model and that is not what we need. It actually damages what people have going for them in the first place. If we have to have some kind of job-training from the top-down, it will have to preserve the native talents and abilities of people and not damage them. Schools played a far smaller role in the life of the community until recently. Now the system manufactures ignorance.

Dean Baker alludes to this when he points out that these well-educated experts have managed to wreck the economy and face no accountability.  From the article:

Of course Brooks is right. Working class men are ill-prepared to deal with the effects of incredible economic mismanagement that has made them its primary victims. It has been conscious policy of David Brooks and his peers to weaken welfare state supports, making income and well-being almost entirely dependent on employment. Now, because David Brooks' highly-educated peers are incompetent economic managers, millions of working class people (disproportionately men) are facing extended periods of unemployment. And, naturally Brooks sees their difficulty in dealing with this crisis as a failure of working class culture.

This blaming of people for their educational attainments is a strange view but no doubt it is ingrained in us at an early age.  If we can blame poor children for not making good grades, if we can blame the working class for not going to college, if we can accept that the problem is that we need more opportunities (to fail, to be ranked and filtered out: we need realities, not opportunities), then it is easy to blame the victims.  We learned it as children.

Indeed, the mass collectivization represented by modern public school systems is a threat to our national mental health and predisposes us to an authoritarian culture.  We learn to accept this authoritarian culture at an early age in schools. The factors that limited the impact of this mass molding of our psyches, positive social capital and plentiful work outside of the school system (from agricultural in the early 20th century to the computer industry in the last 50 years), these factors are greatly diminished or have turned to negatives.

keen at google

Another economics resource and one I greatly enjoyed.  Stephen Keen from DebtWatch at Google.  Longish but with good questions at end.  Keen says he is into simulation and dynamics and is a non-orthodox economics person and also, came late to economics as a non-traditional older student.

Progressive Economics Links

Image at left is of the Panic of 1884 on Wall Street with thanks to Creative Commons.

From Dollars and Sense: Real World Economics, some progressive resources for teaching economics. Note the Field Guide to the American Economy, articles about bias in texts, and books of actual readings and cases.

From the Post-Autistic Economics Network, toxic texts and approaches that students at major colleges have been protesting for some time. Student essays are also here.

Free lectures: the History of Economic Thought and more at Stephen Keen's DebtWatch. (Keen is a Professor at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.)

High school and college-level resources are here at the Economics Network: lectures, videos, worksheets, online tutorials and more.

Do not miss the standup economist whose website has a link to his open-source introductory economics text and a link to a more in-depth additional text (free).

Annenberg has these good video courses: Economics U$A and Inside the Global Economy.

Marxian economics are widely studied in most countries around the world by many people who are not Marxists but can understand Marx's contribution to the science of economics. The Chinese know Marx as well as capitalist/other thinkers. In the US, students are often ill-informed about Marx so here are resources.  Make up your own mind.

Goldstein's Low Wage Capitalism is quite current and available here.  David Harvey's website has good resources and he is a well-regarded modern interpreter.  Harvey did an RSA Animation:



This Marxist site includes a hypermedia neo-classical economics text with only one chapter on Marxist economics (under Connections) which is quite tolerant and a Reading Capital study guide. 

The way everyone bats around terms like capitalism and socialism, you'd think it was a walk in the park to easily identify the economic systems of nation-states. I think it is a quite complicated exercise and a tribute to the poor education of many Americans that we think otherwise. Can you sort out totalitarianism from fascism from socialism from communism from capitalism?

Skip the lightweight work of Ayn Rand and dig into the work of Hannah Arendt whose Origins of Totalitarianism is online here.  Also check out Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.

I gave an overview, drawn in part from F. Braudel's work, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries, 3 vols. (1979) English translation by Siân Reynold, to some middle schoolers last year, focusing on the tools of capitalism:  Arabic numerals, checks, credit, money, banks, double-entry bookkeeping, and other innovations. This wikipedia entry gives a brief overview of the books, Braudel takes a new slant, neither neo-classical nor Marxian. 

Add a good read on corporations, their history and structure. We recently watched the documentary The Corporation. Nadar's Citizen Works has lots of resources, too.  


Teaching Economics As If People Mattered incorporates social justice issues.  real-world economics review has lots of articles and is a free subscription.



And there are innumerable blogs out there now of all stripes: I like DebtWatch, Naked Capitalism, CreditWritedowns, Zero Hedge, and occasional links & commentary but there are lots of sites out there.