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Eco­Soc invited Ross Gittins to speak at an event at USyd on Thursday, where he presen­ted a series of reas­ons on the topic of why neo-classical eco­nom­ics is flawed. He was quick to point out that he still fun­da­ment­ally sub­scribes to neo-classical eco­nom­ics, but that it neg­lects (what he thinks are) import­ant con­sid­er­a­tions. My imme­di­ate impres­sion was that he’s a bit gruff and stub­born. When ques­tioned about his ideas, he was adam­ant that he was right, and other con­sid­er­a­tions missed the point. How­ever, that might have been because the tosser ques­tioner used the word “epistemological”.

He made the inter­est­ing obser­va­tion that eco­nom­ics split off from the “harder” sci­ences well before cer­tain fun­da­ment­als had been estab­lished, and so what we have now is a dis­cip­line that is inces­tu­ously self-contained and unwill­ing to embrace out­side ideas. On top of that, eco­nom­ists’ desire to be taken ser­i­ously has led them to “rigourise” their dis­cip­line by import­ing math­em­at­ical and eco­no­met­ric mod­els. Gittins feels that these mod­els are simply inad­equate in account­ing for the total­ity of human behaviour.

Gittins also attacked the cent­ral assump­tion in eco­nom­ics – that humans behave ration­ally. He poin­ted to people’s desire to bal­ance work and life, giv­ing gifts, con­spicu­ous con­sump­tion, and an over­rid­ing “fair­ness” mech­an­ism that all ques­tion the ration­al­ity assumption.

While Gittins’ cri­ti­cisms of the eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sion are cer­tainly valid, he seems to broadly ignore that many of his gripes are increas­ingly dealt with in beha­vi­oural and het­ero­dox eco­nom­ics. His paternal father-knows-best cri­ti­cism of people’s spend­ing habits is not cred­ible given the sur­pris­ingly stable level of income spent on con­sump­tion over the past 50 years. His grumble that there is too much phys­ics and not enough psy­cho­logy in eco­nom­ics has been taken up the ortho­doxy.

All-in-all it was a pretty waffly talk. I amused myself by fold­ing paper ties. Enoch was par­tic­u­larly bored.

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