July 23, 2017

Why don’t you do what Joan Robinson told you to do?

Comment on Lars Syll on ‘When ignorance is bliss’

Blog-Reference and Blog-Reference on Jul 30

The geniality of Joan Robinson is engraved in everlasting granite with this verdict about economics: “Scrap the lot and start again.”

To her fellow economists, she referred as a “throng of superfluous economists”. Indeed, this is their track record: provably false
• profit theory, for 200+ years,
• Walrasian microfoundations (including equilibrium), for 150+ years,
• Keynesian macrofoundations (including I=S, IS-LM), for 80+ years.

ALL theories/models that contain profit, maximization-and-equilibrium, or I=S/IS-LM are a priori false and this is more than 90 percent of the content of peer-reviewed economic quality journals and 100 percent of textbooks of renowned authors since 1948.

The student of economic theory is taught supply-demand-equilibrium. This is proto-scientific garbage, but “Before he ever does ask, he has become a professor, and so sloppy habits of thought are handed on from one generation to the next.” (Joan Robinson)

Thus, the propagation of silly orthodox economics goes on and on and the silly heterodox critique, too, goes on and on and 100 percent of what orthodox or heterodox or pluralistic muddle-headed economics professors teach is provably false.

Joan Robinson realized this and told the world. High time now to draw the logical consequence.#1

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


#1 See also
► You are fired!
► Joan Robinson and the ‘throng of superfluous economists’
► Let’s do it
► A science without scientists
► Habermas, Albert, Robinson, Syll are right — now scrap the crap
► The overdue public clarification of economics’ actual scientific state
► Will economics ever become a science?

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