The key to controlling humans does not lie in building fences around them, but to steer their minds away from unwanted questions.
By HopeForTheDismalScience
(William P Bell)
The elimination of courses in the history of economics has contributed to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) by eroding institutional memory that allowed the dismantling of structures designed to prevent a re-occurrence of the Great Depression. With little space in the curriculum for reflection on the past, graduate economists feed on a diet of neoclassical mathematics produces an extreme form of bounded rationality where history is both irrelevant and unknown, which makes for a very powerful ideology by steering minds away from unwanted questions.
Earlier posts, titled Economic history: A Renaissance? and Death of the history of economics? discuss further the demise of economic history.
January 21, 2011 at 6:14 am
Indeed; what a sad happening for the world. And what a malnourished lot they are! It presupposes that history is redundant and pure mathematical models — a pretense to masquerading as a hard science — is all that is required. How naive.