“The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise … economics is a form of brain damage.”
~Hazel Henderson
“I’m not trying to make it sound that all economists are intellectual mercenaries. It’s much more complex than that. It has something to do with the sociology of knowledge and with what happens to young minds when they are inducted into a certain kind of educational style. When they come out of the other end of this process they have a certain style of thinking which I refer to as ‘brain damage’ – not endearing me at all to my economist friends. Of course, there are very good, honest economists who don’t do this. I have found that all down through the history of economic thought there have been honest economists who began to explore this body of information and recoiled aghast, saying righteously, “Well, this is an intellectual scandal! This is not rigorous. This is a whole set of ‘deductions’ – a priori types of statements really – and the world doesn’t conform to this kind of economistic model.” And what I found is that every one of these economists who had honestly dished the dirt on this discipline throughout history had been summarily silenced in one way or another. They had not been given tenure, they had been run out of the club in one way or another and it still goes on today. You get critics from within the discipline like, for example, Kenneth Boulding who has always been critical of the entropic nature of modern production and the excessive exploitation rates and what he always calls “cowboy economics”. So, Boulding was run out of the club with, “Oh, well, he really is a philosopher, not an economist.” Or take John Kenneth Galbraith who was a very good critic of the current situation and wrote a lot of books about the ways in which the market didn’t really work, about monopoly power, stuff like that. They designated Galbraith, “Oh, he’s really a sociologist.” So, there’s this kind of game that goes on. Of course the only one they could never shut up was Karl Marx. He had a constituency.”
- from ON SURVIVING ECONOMICS AND OTHER MODERN FORMS OF BRAIN DAMAGE
To read more by Helen Henderson see here
Also see: Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Henderson) and from Chelsea Green (http://www.chelseagreen.com/authors/hazel_henderson) and from Henderson’s web site (http://www.hazelhenderson.com/):
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