Our universities need to start teaching economics differently

“Despite the pressure on universities to feed the financial industry with young, focused minds, there are efforts under way to broaden the outlook of economics graduates. The Core project was adopted by 13 UK universities last September and has won £3.7m from the Economic and Social Research Council.

It is an improvement, albeit an incremental one, that brings back a bit of Marxism (though just a discussion of Karl’s labour-market theory). The developers of the programme also claim it has freed itself from neoliberal thinking, which judges markets to be self-adjusting and consumers and businesses to be operating with the same information. The world is full of asymmetric power and information relationships, and Core reflects this.”

This is an extract from an article in this weekend’s “Observer” newspaper which provides a little hope that our universities might start to teach a version of economics that has learned from the crash of 20o8 and reflects how markets work in the real world.


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