Follow up na Alešev post Nujna je sprememba ekonomskega kurikuluma. Včeraj so se o tem razpisali tudi drugi (tuji) mediji. The Guardian je bil zelo sočen:

From any rational point of view, orthodox economics is in serious trouble. Its champions not only failed to foresee the greatest crash for 80 years, but insisted such crises were a thing of the past. More than that, some of its leading lights played a key role in designing the disastrous financial derivatives that helped trigger the meltdown in the first place.

Plenty were paid propagandists for the banks and hedge funds that tipped us off their speculative cliff. Acclaimed figures in a discipline that claims to be scientific hailed a “great moderation” of market volatility in the runup to an explosion of unprecedented volatility. Others, such as the Nobel prizewinner Robert Lucas, insisted that economics had solved the “central problem of depression prevention”.

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Many of their students, though, have had enough. A revolt against the orthodoxy has been smouldering for years and now seems to have gone critical. Fed up with parallel universe theories that have little to say about the world they’re interested in, students at Manchester University have set up a post-crash economics society with 800 members, demanding an end to monolithic neoclassical courses and the introduction of a pluralist curriculum.

They want other schools of economic thought taught in parallel, from Keynesian to more radical theories – with a better record on predicting and connecting with the real world economy – along with green and feminist economics. The campaign is spreading fast: to Cambridge, Essex, the London School of Economics and a dozen other campuses, and linking up with university groups in France, Germany, Slovenia and Chile.

Tudi The Economist je v redkem momentu britanskega ponosa pristavil svoj piskrček in izpostavil vlogo dveh britanskih ekonomistov, Keynesa in Hicksa, ki sta revolucionirala ekonomsko teorijo po gospodarski depresiji pred 80 leti, ter izpostavil Britanijo kot začetnika renesanse študija ekonomije:

Britain has form here. In the early 1930s economics was in a terrible state. The global economy was stuck in a rut, and economists could not explain why. Two Britons changed things. In 1933, John Maynard Keynes, an economist at Cambridge University, supplied the raw ingredients: a new theory that explained how deficient demand could lead to persistent recessions and long-term unemployment. The ideas were radical but technical. They really took off when John Hicks, then also at Cambridge, distilled Keynes’s ideas into a simple model which quickly became the backbone of undergraduate teaching.

Now that the conditions for change are ripe again, Britain is well placed to take a lead.

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It is not just students who are dissatisfied with economics. Professional economists can spot easy wins too. Many think economic history should be more widely taught, citing the fact that Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve, influenced by his knowledge of the Great Depression and of Japan’s slump in the 1990s, outperformed rich-world peers. It is not merely American financial history that matters, either. Stanley Fischer, governor of Israel’s central bank between 2005 and 2013, says he found economic history (including Walter Bagehot’s famous rule—to provide generous amounts of cash to troubled banks, but to charge them for it) useful in combating the 2008 crisis. This material had long fallen off the syllabus in most universities before the crash.

A new group of teachers is now listening. Led by Wendy Carlin, an economist at University College London, they are designing a new university-level curriculum. The project, which aims to launch for the 2014-15 academic year, will change things in a number of ways.

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Ms Carlin’s project has benefited from hedge fund money too, with cash coming from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) a think-tank set up by George Soros, an investor, in 2009. INET now funds $4m in economics projects per year, including a new research centre at Oxford University. Keynes too was an active investor who thought the role of economics was to protect the good things in life—music, art and intellectual life. He would have thoroughly approved.