Several correspondents have just told me that some of Greg Mankiw’s students at Harvard are staging a walkout from his first year class. They’ve written an open letter to Mankiw to explain why: An Open Letter to Greg Mankiw
I applaud them for this move. Mankiw’s various economics texts are among the most simplistic of the many neoclassical textbooks that parade this flawed paradigm as a flawless jewel of human reasoning. I’m delighted that his students have taken the rebellion against this paradigm to one of its key promulgators.
I did likewise forty years ago–against far less well-known advocates of neoclassicism. At the time, I probably knew as much as these students do today of the enormous literature that establishes how fallacious neoclassical theory is, and which of course neoclassical texts like Mankiw’s completely ignore.
These students will undoubtedly be told that they have misunderstood and misjudged both the theory and Mankiw’s course–which I was also told when I revolted against Simkin’s economics at Sydney University back in 1972. They are certainly lacking knowledge of the literature–and they rightly attribute this to the “education” they are receiving in Mankiw’s course:
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
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