ON STUDYING ECONOMICS J. Christopher Proctor Graduate student in Political Economy, Kingston University and Université Paris 13
A Student’s Perspective I started studying economics in high school in the United States in 2009. The financial system had just collapsed. Things were getting bailed out left and right. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were being lost each month. The biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression was entering its second year. But in economics class? None of that. Each day, as the economy disintegrated, we would open our textbooks to shifting supply and demand curves and movements along production possibilities frontiers. It was all so remote, and had little to do with the economy we saw at home and in the news. Towards the end of the year we learned about business cycles and aggregate supply and demand. This was closer, but if economists knew all these things, why on earth couldn’t they stop the sky from falling? I needed to know more, so I studied economics at university, but here too I felt the economics curriculum sidestepped a real discussion of what was going on outside. The models were more complex and mathematical, but just as remote; theories to be memorised and reproduced, but not tested, debated or applied to the real world. I knew I was not the only one who was unhappy with what was being taught, but I had no idea that around the world, hundreds of dissatisfied economics students were beginning to organise to demand something more. Today, groups such as Rethinking Economics, PostCrash Economics, PEPS Économie, Netzwerk Plurale Ökonomik, and the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics have 22