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Harvard walkout highlights controversy over wealth gap
By Greg Cusack |
November 25, 2011, Friday
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Print Edition
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IN an echo of the student demonstrations of my youth, around 70 students walked out of Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw's class earlier this month "in order to express discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course," they wrote in an open letter to the professor.
They continued:
"As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific - and limited - view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.
"A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith's economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory."
A former student in that same class defended Greg Mankiw, who had been an economic advisor to president George W. Bush and who is now advising Republican presidential candidate George Romney, by pointing out that Keynesian theory would be explored in depth in the second semester, which begins in January.
However that might be, Professor Mankiw - in a subsequent interview with National Public Radio - was evasive when pushed as to whether the scope of current economic inequality was "worrisome" or "harmful." True to right-wing beliefs now rampant in the Republican Party, he refused to allow that there might be a role which government can or ought to play in addressing this issue.
Market cycle
His view - that this was "simply" the result of economic forces playing out in a "market cycle" - flows from the Right's playbook, a theme begun under former President Reagan and which has become increasingly vitriolic and rigid in the decades since his term of office.
His claim that it has been on the rise "for the past 70 years" is false, however. In fact, the "golden age" of rising opportunity for all Americans occurred in the years following World War II through the 1960s. It was during the 1960s when, spurred by civil unrest and assassinations at home, President Johnson led a then-courageous Congress to enact civil rights laws and significant additions to the social welfare net beneath all citizens, most notably the Medicare program for citizens 65 and older.
While the Shanghai Daily has reported on the scope of America's growing inequality today, it is useful to briefly review the facts again.
As recently as 1976, the top 1 percent of Americans controlled "only" 8.9 percent of total wealth in the US. By 2007, this figure had jumped to 23.5 percent, a level last seen in the immediate pre-Great Depression year of 1928. In 2010, the 400 richest individuals controlled US$1.37 trillion, greater than the combined wealth of the lower 60 percent of Americans.
National unemployment currently hovers at 9.0 percents, but masks that many millions have simply stopped looking for jobs (many economists speculate that the true number of out-of work Americans is closer to 16 percent), and that many of these same millions have been unemployed for almost one year or more.
Would a reasonable person not feel that these figures - and trends - were worrisome? That they suggest the danger of growing social instability resulting from perceived inequities and injustices? Would not a caring and responsive government be stirred into both addressing the causes of these inequities and assisting the unemployed?
Such a reasonable person, however, would be dismayed at the display of callousness so evident in American political rhetoric right now, and at the manner in which the Right within the Congress has stymied efforts to raise taxes on the obscenely rich and provide assistance to the unemployed.
Despite the pretensions of some economists, economics is most definitely not a hard "science." It has its own theorists, disciples, and rigid-thinking true believers.
But those who insist that there are "market forces" which work mysteriously "on their own" and are best "not interfered with by government" are flat-out wrong.
The students at Harvard were right. Economics must join the rest of academia in asking value questions of the evidence and encourage the three-step process of intelligent social beings: Observe the facts; discern the effect of the situation on others, including the least-favored and least powerful; and then formulate actions to address and redress the situation.
The injustices of income inequality are multiple, and they make a mockery of America's pledge to pursue "liberty and justice for all." As long as one family lives in poverty, we have failed. Inaction in the face of injustice is not a moral option!
We need to collectively "walk out" of the Right's classroom; we need the courage to "occupy" our politics with a renewed sense of compassion and justice.
The author has been a college teacher of American history and political science, the director of the US National Catholic Rural Life Conference; he served as a member of the Iowa State House of Representatives, and retired from public service in the Iowa executive branch in 2004. Shanghai Daily condensed article.
They continued:
"As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific - and limited - view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.
"A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith's economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory."
A former student in that same class defended Greg Mankiw, who had been an economic advisor to president George W. Bush and who is now advising Republican presidential candidate George Romney, by pointing out that Keynesian theory would be explored in depth in the second semester, which begins in January.
However that might be, Professor Mankiw - in a subsequent interview with National Public Radio - was evasive when pushed as to whether the scope of current economic inequality was "worrisome" or "harmful." True to right-wing beliefs now rampant in the Republican Party, he refused to allow that there might be a role which government can or ought to play in addressing this issue.
Market cycle
His view - that this was "simply" the result of economic forces playing out in a "market cycle" - flows from the Right's playbook, a theme begun under former President Reagan and which has become increasingly vitriolic and rigid in the decades since his term of office.
His claim that it has been on the rise "for the past 70 years" is false, however. In fact, the "golden age" of rising opportunity for all Americans occurred in the years following World War II through the 1960s. It was during the 1960s when, spurred by civil unrest and assassinations at home, President Johnson led a then-courageous Congress to enact civil rights laws and significant additions to the social welfare net beneath all citizens, most notably the Medicare program for citizens 65 and older.
While the Shanghai Daily has reported on the scope of America's growing inequality today, it is useful to briefly review the facts again.
As recently as 1976, the top 1 percent of Americans controlled "only" 8.9 percent of total wealth in the US. By 2007, this figure had jumped to 23.5 percent, a level last seen in the immediate pre-Great Depression year of 1928. In 2010, the 400 richest individuals controlled US$1.37 trillion, greater than the combined wealth of the lower 60 percent of Americans.
National unemployment currently hovers at 9.0 percents, but masks that many millions have simply stopped looking for jobs (many economists speculate that the true number of out-of work Americans is closer to 16 percent), and that many of these same millions have been unemployed for almost one year or more.
Would a reasonable person not feel that these figures - and trends - were worrisome? That they suggest the danger of growing social instability resulting from perceived inequities and injustices? Would not a caring and responsive government be stirred into both addressing the causes of these inequities and assisting the unemployed?
Such a reasonable person, however, would be dismayed at the display of callousness so evident in American political rhetoric right now, and at the manner in which the Right within the Congress has stymied efforts to raise taxes on the obscenely rich and provide assistance to the unemployed.
Despite the pretensions of some economists, economics is most definitely not a hard "science." It has its own theorists, disciples, and rigid-thinking true believers.
But those who insist that there are "market forces" which work mysteriously "on their own" and are best "not interfered with by government" are flat-out wrong.
The students at Harvard were right. Economics must join the rest of academia in asking value questions of the evidence and encourage the three-step process of intelligent social beings: Observe the facts; discern the effect of the situation on others, including the least-favored and least powerful; and then formulate actions to address and redress the situation.
The injustices of income inequality are multiple, and they make a mockery of America's pledge to pursue "liberty and justice for all." As long as one family lives in poverty, we have failed. Inaction in the face of injustice is not a moral option!
We need to collectively "walk out" of the Right's classroom; we need the courage to "occupy" our politics with a renewed sense of compassion and justice.
The author has been a college teacher of American history and political science, the director of the US National Catholic Rural Life Conference; he served as a member of the Iowa State House of Representatives, and retired from public service in the Iowa executive branch in 2004. Shanghai Daily condensed article.
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