From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/economy/cornel-west-economists-wake-your-mechanistic-cartesian-dream
West and Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof talk markets and morality.
By Lynn Stuart Parramore
November 26, 2012
What happens when you throw economists, theologians and a literature professor into a room to talk about markets and morality? Sparks fly, that’s what. Including a warning from Cornel West that we are “losing the class war.”
Wednesday night at NYC’s Union Theological Seminary, competing ideas clashed and questions tumbled forth in a spirited disucssion: Are people really equal? What does that mean economically? Does mathematics or history provide a better lens for approaching economic issues? Does the market really deliver what people want? How can we avoid being exploited by the market?
The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) hosted the second installment in an intriguing series of conversations on economics and theology featuring Nobel Prize–winning economist and INET advisory board member George Akerlof; UTS theologian Dr. Cornel West; UTS president Rev. Dr. Serene Jones; English professor and former director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library Betty Sue Flowers; and INET executive director Robert Johnson.
Akerlof, who teaches at Berkeley, is an economist known for his challenges to the neoclassical theory dominant in his field for the past several decades. He has repeatedly shown that markets do not work the way their worshippers insist: people do not have adequate information when they make purchases; they often behave irrationally; and markets often work very inefficiently. His latest book, co-authored with Rachel Kranton, explores how our social identities shape our economic destinies.
On Wednesday Akerlof talked about his new book in the works, Phishing for Phools , which looks at how free markets give free rein to all manner of hustlers who prey on our emotional and cognitive weaknesses to sell us things that we don’t need and may harm us. In this climate, he insists, even reasonable, intelligent people are routinely caught in market snares. Drawing upon colorful illustrations of 19th-century swindlers who sold tonics that often cured customers of the disease of life itself, Akerlof underscored the importance of regulation in the market minefield.
What happens when you throw economists, theologians and a literature professor into a room to talk about markets and morality? Sparks fly, that’s what. Including a warning from Cornel West that we are “losing the class war.”
Wednesday night at NYC’s Union Theological Seminary, competing ideas clashed and questions tumbled forth in a spirited disucssion: Are people really equal? What does that mean economically? Does mathematics or history provide a better lens for approaching economic issues? Does the market really deliver what people want? How can we avoid being exploited by the market?
The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) hosted the second installment in an intriguing series of conversations on economics and theology featuring Nobel Prize–winning economist and INET advisory board member George Akerlof; UTS theologian Dr. Cornel West; UTS president Rev. Dr. Serene Jones; English professor and former director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library Betty Sue Flowers; and INET executive director Robert Johnson.
Akerlof, who teaches at Berkeley, is an economist known for his challenges to the neoclassical theory dominant in his field for the past several decades. He has repeatedly shown that markets do not work the way their worshippers insist: people do not have adequate information when they make purchases; they often behave irrationally; and markets often work very inefficiently. His latest book, co-authored with Rachel Kranton, explores how our social identities shape our economic destinies.
On Wednesday Akerlof talked about his new book in the works, Phishing for Phools , which looks at how free markets give free rein to all manner of hustlers who prey on our emotional and cognitive weaknesses to sell us things that we don’t need and may harm us. In this climate, he insists, even reasonable, intelligent people are routinely caught in market snares. Drawing upon colorful illustrations of 19th-century swindlers who sold tonics that often cured customers of the disease of life itself, Akerlof underscored the importance of regulation in the market minefield.
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/cornel-west-economists-wake-your-mechanistic-cartesian-dream
