Economists for an Imaginary World

Click on the title to read the article.

I have created a link to this article because I believe it is the economic policies of the Chicago School (the Canadian branch being the Calgary School), as adopted by the Bush government in the States and the Harper government here in Canada that results in cuts to the arts and programs of social benefit.

This article by Harold Meyerson outlines how the Chicago School of Economics works with impossibly limited mathematical models that do not take into account human behaviour to explain economic activity and to influence government policy. He compares their economic theories to pre-Copernian philosphers, who argued that all celestial bodies revoled around the earth:

Has any group of professionals ever been so spectacularly wrong? Pre-Copernican astronomers and cosmologists, I suppose, and for the same reason, really: They had an entire, internally consistent, theoretically rich system that described the universe. They were wrong -- the sun and other celestial bodies save the moon didn't actually revolve around the Earth, as they insisted -- but no matter. It was a thing of beauty, their cosmic order. A vast faith was sustained in part by their pseudo-science, a faith from which such free thinkers as Galileo deviated at their own risk. 

I agree with this article in its entirety and encourage those who believe in the church of the free-market to reconsider their faith and join those who wish to live in a society where our affairs are guided by the best science that is comprehensive in its scope.

Maynard Keynes believed in a short work-week and full employment as a recipe for a healthy and happy society. Such a society though, requires less profit for business owners, and so many such business people prefer a model that maintains as high as possible level of unemployment so that the workforce will remain in a state of fear of not being able to keep their job and having to join the poor and destitute. In every society where the experiment of the Chicago School has been attempted, the result has not been the promised "trickle-down" effect of wealth, but quite the opposite: more wealth in the hands of fewer people. See Naomi Klein's web site.