Philip Pilkington: Your book seems to me a much needed antidote to the mainstream economics textbooks and can either be read alone or together with them. I think that’s a great approach because it allows students to become familiar with what is being taught in the classroom but also allows them to take a critical perspective on this material. So, let’s start with the format of these textbooks. In the book you say that they “cloak themselves in an aura of objectivity”. You then relate this to the fact that economics is not a value-free discipline and contains necessary ideological judgements. Could you talk about this a bit? Tony Myatt: That’s correct. We say the texts cloak themselves with an aura of objectivity while at the same time implicitly (and repeatedly) making value judgements that reflect a particular ideology. Indeed, one of our main objectives in our Anti-Textbook is to provide overwhelming evidence of that. We believe that students subjected to the mainstream textbooks sense the bias in those texts (and the courses that rely on them) and it turns them off. They realize they are being sold something. They don’t like being bamboozled. Evidence for this is provided by the recent walkout from Mankiw’s introductory economics course. Even though the students could not elaborate very clearly the nature of the bias (in the letter they wrote explaining their actions), which unfortunately made them seem quite naive, those students were correct that the bias is there. One might say they intuitively sensed it.
Delightfully for us, Mankiw replied to these students in his New York Times column, saying “I don’t view the study of economics as laden with ideology…It is a method rather than a doctrine….a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.” Notice the wording he uses, “correct conclusions.” If there were “correct conclusions” to be drawn from using the economic method of thinking, there would be a consensus among economists on most positive economic questions. And while the mainstream texts always claim that such a consensus exists, the evidence suggests otherwise. I’m not just talking here about the profession’s response to the financial meltdown and the ongoing economic crisis, but even more mundane questions such as the effect on unemployment of an increase in the minimum wage. So, Mankiw is simply showing his own bias by implicitly claiming a consensus, by saying there are “correct” conclusions to be drawn.
Our perspective is that there is an ideology that pervades mainstream economics, especially in the way it is currently practiced and taught. There is an important point here: that we can distinguish between neoclassical economics itself...
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