Academics told to work on more relevant syllabus for economics

Academicians should work towards a more relevant syllabus for the economics students of Indian universities, according to leading developmental economist MA Oommen.

He said this while inaugurating the Inter-University Centre for Alternative Economics at the Kerala University and first international conference on the ‘Development question in a developing economy.’

Economics syllabi Economics is not neutral between ends and research to understand social reality has to be done on a multi-disciplinary canvas. It is high time economists venture to rethink the content, goals and tools of their discipline.

Ommen recalled that neoclassical economics dominated the economics syllabi of Indian universities and that Marxian economics was treated as poison and propaganda.

He questioned the irrationality of keeping economic history, economic thought and several other subjects out of their bounds. “I strongly believe that students have to be told that there are other meat in the kitchen.”

There’s a need for rethinking on the content, tools and goals of the discipline of economics. There’s also a need for rethinking its various concepts.

Picketty prescript Oommen endorsed Nobel laureate Thomas Picketty, who views economics as a sub-discipline of the social sciences, along side history, sociology, anthropology and political science.

His work has upset the apple cart of mainstream economics and he has endeavoured to prove that the balancing forces of growth, competition and technological progress in the past have not succeeded in reducing inequalities or promoted social harmony.

He acquired world fame for producing historical evidence for 300 years in 20 countries to show that private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

This was a prophecy which Karl Marx made in the 19th century more in an apocalyptical fashion rather than on solid data.

Neoclassical burden Economics has now come to be accepted as a ‘professional decision science’ that seeks optimal solutions to allocation problems. This is the essence of neoclassical economics which made economy ‘external’ to society.

The basic affirmation is that in a competitive economy composed of rational agents, economic activities are related to one another through a system of prices.

But the fact that consequences of reducing social life into a price calculus are far-reaching is forgotten.

By creating an economy virtually dissociated from society it became logical to exclude social costs, depletion of natural resources and properties of future generations from accountancy and balance sheets of business corporations.

Certainly, resource allocation need not always be via price mechanism and can have alternative ways of allocation.

Basic needs Oommen questioned the assumption of unlimited wants on which the so-called ‘scarcity’ definition of economics and much of neoclassical edifice is grounded.

While wants are unlimited, basic needs are not. Conceptual categories to ensure fair allocation of basic needs got out of the scope of mainstream economics.

Given scarcity of resources, economics became a science of choice between alternative ends.

By valuing means above ends, the freedom of human beings to choose the ends they favour is undermined. The development of means, as it were, dictates the choice of ends.

Oommen lamented that development economics has failed to address several fundamental social choice issues like more butter or more gun, prevention of abject poverty in the midst of plenty.

Intellectuals have failed in the task of transforming the world handed down to them. This is best evidenced, for instance, in the circumstances leading to the Occupy Wall Street movement and its aftermath.

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