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- [00:10]
A
Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, the conditions of our jobs, our debts, those of our children, and those looming down the road. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. And my hope is that I've learned as a teacher how to understand and present things in a way that makes sense and that holds your interest. So let's turn to some of the biggest events of the last week since I've been on this program. And of course, the biggest one probably is what happened over the weekend, this last weekend, when literally hundreds of thousands of young Americans, high school students in the main, took to the streets, took to the parks of the United States to express their pain, their suffering, their anger, and their demands about the gun violence which is off the charts in this country. We have more shootings, more killings with guns than any other country on the face of the earth. And none of the others is even close. And we all know what happened in Florida a few weeks ago. I want to say something about the economics to contribute something beyond the powerful and the poetic that these high school students have articulated. But before I do, I want to take my hat off. Those young people are acting in the way that a really democratic society can and should applaud. They feel strongly about an issue. They're explaining themselves, they're sharing their commitments and. And they're acting collectively to make a difference. Bravo to them for exposing how many of us don't get together with our fellow human beings to make this society better for all of us. Now, to the economics of this situation. The big pusher for guns in this country is not the gun companies that make the guns. Of course they want to sell more because that's how a capitalist enterprise works. They don't worry about the secondary consequences. It's so much collateral damage. They want to sell guns because therein lies the profit, which is why they're in business. So I understand that. I want to look at the nra. You know, it could have been a typical association, you know, like the archery association. It would then be something that would interest hunters and it would interest people who enjoy target practice with guns. Just like an archery society would have people who use bow and arrow for hunting and people who like to become proficient in using that particular item. And it would be no problem in this society virtually at all. It would be an association for hunters and sharpshooters and people looking to do those things. No problem. But the NRA long ago had ambitions to be much more. And those ambitions have been realized. What did the NRA choose to do? Number to become an ad agency for the gun makers. Whatever the gun makers decided to spend on advertisements in sports magazines, etc. The NRA took them to a whole new level. It explained to the gun makersor maybe the gun makers explained it to them. We'll never know that there was a way to get many more guns sold than you could ever sell to hunters and sharpshooters. Could you get Americans to buy lots of guns, not for hunting and not even for target practice, just to have them? And the NRA's answer was, yeah, we can do that. How do we do that? We latch onto an ideology here in America that is very useful for us. Here's the ideology. Whenever something goes wrong with the economy. Unemployment, bad jobs, low pay, poor benefits, insecure jobs, don't blame the companies. They don't want that. Blame the government. When you lose your home to a foreclosure, don't blame the bank that forced you out. Blame the government. Wow, that would be a wonderful ideology for capitalism because it would allow the company to really screw you. And you don't get angry at them. You get angry at the government. You paint the government as the ultimate evil. The government is behind it all. The government is what's hurting you. Not only does that help capitalism, but it gives the NRA a new idea. It can go to the mass of people and say, you know that evil government? Well, it wants to take away your gun. It wants to threaten you. It wants to hurt you even more than this economy has already hurt you. But here's something you can do to protect yourself. Get a gun. Get two. Get one for every closet, every room. Protect yourself. It's really all you have left here in America. You can buy a gun, and maybe that'll help you. This idea makes the NRA able to be a better ad agency for the gun companies than they could ever buy. It creates a market to buy the guns bigger than anyone ever dreamed of. Americans have more guns per person than any other society on the face of this earth. But it also makes the NRA a real friend of big business because they participate in demonizing the government, making the government the bad guy in all of our life's problems. Not the economy, not the employer, not the store that charges us too much money or gives us bad service or takes away the benefits of our job. No, no, no. The government is the problem. Every capitalist's dream is to make somebody else Take the fall. The second big news of this week had to do with tariffs. President Trump imposed a whole bunch of tariffs, mostly on China, punishing China, he said, because it was hurting America by its economic power and growth and, and achievement. He was cashing in on an opportunity and on a campaign promise he had made. Let's take a look at the tariffs first. Let's begin by being sure we all understand what a tariff is. It's simply a tax with a particular name. Here's how it goods coming from China, let's say Something that cost $100 would now have to pay on top of the hundred dollars that you would have had to pay if there weren't a tariff. There is now a tariff, meaning there's a tax applied to this article as it enters the United States. Let's suppose it's 25%. That article that you used to be able to buy from China for $100 would now cost you $125. Why is that a good idea? Says Mr. Trump. Well, he says American companies who can't make that good for $100, who can only make it at a profit if they charge $120, weren't able to sell any before because we wouldn't pay $120 when we could buy the Chinese item for 100. By slapping a tariff on the Chinese item, its price goes up to $125. And now we Americans, confronted by having to pay 125 for the Chinese article, will instead buy the American one for 120. And that, we are told, will mean more jobs for Americans in American companies producing that now $120 item we're buying because we can't buy the Chinese one at 100 anymore because it's become 125. That's the story. Let's take a look at the economics here so we aren't fooled. Number one, the Chinese aren't stupid and the Chinese aren't impoverished and the Chinese are not powerless. The first thing the Chinese can do, and they've already proposed it, is, is to do tariffs in return to do the same thing to the United States that the United States has just done to China. And what that will do will be to persuade the Chinese people to buy from their own producers rather than to bring stuff in from the United States because the cost of bringing stuff in from the United States has just been raised by the Chinese tariff. They're particularly going to do that to agricultural goods and various other kinds of things that are going to hurt American farmers and American businesses. Whatever. The extra jobs we get here from a tariff on Chinese goods will be offset by the lost jobs here because we can't sell goods to China anymore. Anyone who's ever learned any economics gets. Mr. Trump and his supporters want us only to think about the jobs you get when you levy a tariff and never ask how it can play out and undo itself. But that's the least of it. Remember what I said about the price going up? We're all going to now pay $120 for that item from China or for the American substitute for it. And that means prices are going to go up. Let me say that prices are going to go up. American people can't afford to buy the things they need. Now, as we all know, if the prices go up because of the tariffs, which is what will happenand it always does, it's going to mean Americans can buy less than they could afford before. It's going to make economic conditions hard, harder for Americans as a buying public. Where does that figure in to all of the discussion? It doesn't. It's left out, but it is childishly obvious. This drives home the central point to keep in mind. This tariff is being discussed in mainstream media in terms of what its effects will be, what the Chinese will do. So stop. No one knows what all the effects it'll take years to figure out. We do know prices will go up. We do know that jobs may go up or down, but it won't be a big difference. So what is all of this about? This is political theater. This is a president doing what presidents so often do. Our problem in the United States is an economic system that's not working very well for most of us. Yes, it's very good for those at the top. They're happy. The 1% to 5% at the top are doing great. The corporations just got the biggest tax cut they could dream of. They're in fine shape. The rest of us. No. And this is political theater. We're not supposed to look at this economic system and say it's not working for us. We're supposed to be mad and at somebody else. And Mr. Trump has an endless list of somebody else's. We should be angry at immigrants, Ladies and gentlemen. This is a country of 325 million people. Roughly. The number of undocumented immigrants in this country may be 10 or 11 million. Do the arithmetic. Our economic problems, we 325 million are not dependent on what happens to to 11 million poor immigrants. It's silly, but he can get people very angry at those foreigners. That's always easy. And tariffs on Chinese, guess what? That's slapping some more foreigners. At least it sounds like that. It distracts you. It gets you focused on something other than the economic system that is screwing you. That's the key message. That's what we need to understand. Don't get lost in the weeds. Those are the basics of what has agitated our economy over the last week. Now some more quick updates. I want to follow up on the stories we've been covering about the West Virginia teachers who won an extraordinary strike in their state and got finally some decent wage increases. Having been among the poorest paid public school teachers in America, so successful was the West Virginia movement that there are now three more states I want to bring to your attention, actually. Yeah, three that are following that, using what happened in West Virginia as a model. Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky. I want to take my hat off again to the West Virginia teachers and now to these others who, like the students on the gun issue, are beginning to understand the power of getting together to make economic changes that really matter. Before going on, let me remind you we maintain two websites, make use of them. That's why we prepare them and update them literally every day. The first one is democracyatwork.info all one word, democracyatwork.info the second one is rdwolff with two Fs.com. you can follow us there on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. You can communicate what you like and don't like about the program, what you would like to see us do. I want to particularly also let you know that those websites are available to you 24 7, no charge whatsoever. I want to urge you, particularly if you're a listener and would like to see the program as a television program, please go to patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com economicupdate and there you can see the program as a television program. And I want to also announce that we have a new episode of Puerto Rico Forward that is a special program. It's on our website and it is also available on patreon.com just go there again patreon.com puerto puerto rico forward for the latest episode. And you can also get it as a podcast through itunes and Google Play. Next update, it's the turn of BMW to get caught with emissions cheating devices. Last month BMW quietly recalled 11,700 cars to, quote, fix an engine management software issue. Uh oh. Then later last month, BMW admitted that prosecutors in Germany were looking into, quote, erroneously allocated software in about 11,400 vehicles of the BMW 750D and the BMW 550D luxury models. And then last week, the police, a hundred of them, raided BMW headquarters in Munich and a production site in Austria. They were one of the companies that hadn't yet been caught cheating on emissions, polluting the world for profit. But they now have joined the others in showing that profit dominates over human health in a capitalist enterprise based system. Also in the news this last week, difficult negotiations continue between Britain and Europe. The British, as you know, voted a year or more ago to leave the European Union. The Brexit, it's called, the angry British working people voting against their elite government. The Conservative Party and even the Labour Party supported it. To vote to stay, said the elite. And the people said, we're not voting the way you want us to. We don't like what you're doing in this society. We want out. They kind of fell for the idea that their problem was, was Europe and being part of Europe. It's a little bit like Mr. Trump trying to have us believe that the economic problem in America has to do with immigrants or Chinese prices. All of these deflections away from the core economic problem of a system that doesn't work for most people. And the poor British are now locked in this sad debate and negotiation of British government, European government, on the terms of Britain's departure. Here's one thing that the British people have learned and that the rest of the world has to learn too. In the hands of the business community that runs Europe and in the hands of the business community that runs England, they're working out the separation to make sure that the rich stay rich on both sides and the elites stay in power on both sides. The missing member at the negotiation are the mass of people leaving Europe had little to do with the real problems that British working class faces. And the same is true in Europe. And nothing these negotiators from the two elites work out will change that. It'll have to be a bitter lesson learned that voting about a foreign policy issue doesn't solve your problem. ProPublica, a remarkable independent website that you might want to look at. ProPublica.org did a remarkable study that came out last week about discrimination against older workers. In this case, the target was the IBM Corporation. ProPublica did a big survey of former workers at IBM, particularly older ones. And it's in a remarkable study about systematic discrimination against older people. Here are some of the results of that survey I thought would interest you if either you are an older worker or your parents might be. Pretty much includes all of us, doesn't it? Here are the 183 respondents said the company recorded them as having retired by choice even though they had no desire to retire or flat out objected to the idea. 45 people were told they'd have to uproot their lives and move thousands of miles from the communities where they had worked for for years. 53 said their jobs had been moved overseas. I could go on and on. You get the point. The remarkable thing is many workers are still fighting with the company over having been dumped at various stages in their career. You know, a bill was passed not that many years ago called the Age Discrimination in Employment act ad forbids doing this. And that may have something to do. Why? As ProPublica points out, in the year 2009, IBM stopped publishing its American employment total. In 2014, it stopped disclosing the number and ages of older employees that it was laying off, even though that's a requirement of this bill. In other words, companies find ways to to get rid of older workers and replace them with younger ones. The older workers have more experience. The older workers know how the company works. But the older workers cost more money than the young ones. And therein lies the story. The damage done to these older workers. Who cares? Profit rules and we live with the results of so long as a system like this is allowed to continue. Tennessee public employees did something interesting. They went against the governor there, a right wing governor in Tennessee spearheaded by the United Campus Union of the University of Tennessee. They refused to allow in effect, what Governor Had Haslam there proposed, which was nothing short of the privatization of the university system and indeed of much of the public sector. It was a wonderful example not just of workers pushing back and winning. It's an example that the movement of production from the private sector to the public sector is mostly about saving money for big and wealthy corporations and wealthy people who don't want to pay taxes. We shouldn't be debating so much about public versus private. It's not the issue. The issue is what happens to the mass of people, public or private, in terms of running their own lives. Job security. That's the issue, not the relatively less important detail of whether it's public or private. One of the most interesting updates I want to bring to your attention is the publication by the Congressional Budget Office, cbo, its March report. It did an interesting study, the results of which I need to tell you about. They looked at inequality of income in the United States. But they did it in a new way. They didn't just measure who, who gets how much income. Looking at it in terms of the poorest 20%, the less poor 20%, and all the way up to the richest 20% and even up to the richest 1%. That's how it's normally done. But here's what was new and different. They took into account the taxes we have to pay. They took into account the inflation we all face. And they also looked at who got the benefit of, of social safety net programs, antipoverty programs, because they wanted to deal with the right wing argument that we shouldn't be looking just at the money people earn, because some people, the poor get in kind help in terms of food stamps and things like that. So the cbo, responding to this criticism, took all of it into account and here's what it did in its report. It looked at the distribution of income. How did income change between 1979 and 2014? Okay, so that's 35 years, basically the last 35 years. And they looked at how did the different parts of our income distribution, how did they do when you take into account the taxes they pay, the inflation they face, and all the social welfare programs we have in this country. Here we go. You might be interested in this. The poorest 20% went up over those 35 years. 69%. That's what they got over 35 years. 69% works out to 2% a year. Not very bad, not very good. The next 20%, not the poorest 20%, the next to poorest, they only went up 39%. They did 1% a year. They went nowhere. And that's true for almost everybody else, right? Except the top. Let me give you the top 1% of Americans. When you take it all into account, here's how they did over the last 35 years. Their incomes, including the taxes they pay, the inflation they face, and the social welfare programs that other people get, their income went up 227%. There is no way for me to exaggerate the horrendousness of what I've just told you. Over the last 35 years, the rich got richer and, and everybody else didn't. And that's true whether you just look at the money or you adjust it for all the other social programs. The social programs in this country don't undo our inequality. They don't even come close. And inequality has become the overwhelming problem of this society precisely because we have an economic system that works that way. And that's the basic problem we have to face from which everything else is mostly a diversion that you shouldn't be diverted by. We've come to the end of the first half of today's Economic update. Thank you very much for staying with me, and do stay with me for the next half hour because we will have a very, very interesting interview for you that I think will capture your attention as well. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic update. Before introducing my guest for today, I want to talk a little bit about the topic that we're going to be discussing. Discussing. As I've mentioned, I'm a professor of economics. I've been doing that all my adult life, and I've had to face and struggle, as everybody else has in this profession with a difficult, sad fact about economics education in colleges and universities in the United States for the last half century. Basically, the story is because of the Cold War, because of the long years of struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that began in the late 1940s. The previous way of teaching economics, which included the presentation of alternative theories, of those theories that thought capitalism was a really good system and efficient and effective, and those who didn't, those who were critical, those who preferred alternative ways of thinking about economics and alternative economic system, that kind of an economics that debated those questions was pushed aside. Instead, everything got narrowed to a very simple orthodoxy that excluded everything else. And the orthodoxy was the capitalism, the economists told us was the greatest economic system since sliced bread. It couldn't be improved upon, it couldn't be bested. It had no alternative that was worth studying in a sympathetic way from which lessons might be learned. None of that. Marxism, which is the most developed critique of economic orthodoxy that exists in the world, it's the most developed critique of capitalism that exists in the world, was simply excluded from 99% of all economics curriculums as it is today. It's an extraordinary narrow orthodoxy. And the reason I'm telling you this is I've asked to come and join us today a professor of economics who is one of those brave souls growing in number across the United States. And there were always a few who doesn't want this orthodoxy to go on, who wants to open things up? And the phrase he and his colleagues use is heterodox economics, opening economics up to alternative perspectives, having students learn what's good about capitalism and what isn't, what the theories suggest might be a better system and what the theories suggest can't be improved on, but to open the space up. And that's a really important contribution to this country, particularly at this time when so many Americans understand why all too well that capitalism, whatever its virtues, is not doing all that well by the majority of people. So let me turn to my guest and introduce him to you. He is Professor Ian Theda Irizari. He is an assistant professor of economics at the John J. College of the City University of New York. There he teaches Introduction to Economics and Global Economic Capitalism, Political Economy, Economic Development of the Caribbean, and Economics in Historical Perspective. He got his PhD in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his current work focuses on understanding the economic crisis of Puerto Rico. And his popular and academic writings have appeared in outlets inside and outside of the United States. So it really is with pleasure that I welcome to our program. Professor Ian Zadeh Irizarry. Thanks very much for joining.
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Thank you, Rick, for having me yet again in your space and for your viewers and listeners for tuning in.
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A
Good. So tell me what you understand by this term heterodox economics. And I should preface my question by saying I'm going to be asking you about the fact that you've created at your college a master's program in heterodox economics. So I'm going to explore that with you. But let's begin by what is heterodox economics?
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Well, as you mentioned in your introduction, heterodox economics is kind of an umbrella term for capturing alternative perspectives to the mainstream of the discipline, to the orthodoxy. So in that sense, it refers to the outside of the discipline. So the concept itself also is kind of problematic because it doesn't necessarily imply that it's a critique of capitalism. It's just that it might be a different way, for example, of celebrating the system that's not on par with the mainstream. So in that sense, it's a very broad umbrella term. So it's not like what some people like to say, that it's just like radical political economy with a new name. Here in New York City, people like to speak about, oh, salsa music is just mambo. It's a different thing. But we use that term to highlight the openness of alternatives to the orthodoxy.
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A
Okay, so tell me, why is it necessary? Why did your colleagues and you choose to specifically designate your new master's economics programs as heterodox? Why choose that name at this time?
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Well, against all attempts to silence alternatives, there has always been a demand for alternative views, viewpoints concerning the explanations of how the system works. And usually this demand for alternative viewpoints just explodes in moments of crisis of the system. So, for example, in the 1970s, this happened. New textbooks were created. Probably the most famous one, which sought to be an alternative to the classic Paul Samuelson introductory textbook, which is the bible of the discipline, was a project by John Eatwell and John Robinson that didn't get off the ground very well. Then you had at the turn of the century, with that crisis that started around 97 and ended up in 2001, that cut countries like Russia, Argentina, Turkey. You had calls in countries like France from students in universities asking for changes in the curriculum. And with the latest downturn of the economy, we had the case, for example, of students walking out of the classes of somebody like Greg Mankiw, who right now is the most renowned author of the basic textbook that most economic students are willing and are expected actually to tackle and learn from. So in that sense, we are kind of a product of the ups and downs of the crisis. And specifically our department took the shape it took around 2008, 2009, which is the critical years of the most recent downturn of the system. So we basically tapped into that demand and we had, thankfully, which is kind of lucky, the support of the institution to precisely provide this alternative use to our student.
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A
Okay, just for clarification, will your master's program also teach the mainstream or the conventional economics that the vast majority of other programs teach and only teach? In other words, will you include what the others don't include?
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B
So in a sense, I have to be sincere. It's still a work in progress. There's a big important debates within the department within heterodoxy in terms of how to address mainstream economics. So just to give you a good example of this, students, many times, if you teach them the mainstream model and start criticizing at the end, they wonder, why did you teach me from the get go, something that you think is wrong? Why lose my time that way? So we're struggling with how to do it. Clearly, our students will be exposed in one way or another to the mainstream. They have to. They have to be able to criticize not only those economic theories, but also the political thought that emanates from those theories that they see when they read a newspaper, see a television, see politicians speak about the state of the health of the economy, et cetera. So either directly or indirectly, our students are asked to precisely engage with the mainstream, or else we would be committing the same mistake that the orthodoxy commits in excluding us.
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So you'll open it to everything and exclude nothing, basically, or you'll try to be as open as you can.
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Yeah, but we won't Lose our time in using the orthodoxy as the pillar from which then the classes are developed. On the contrary, it's more like we expose our students to the theories that we think make more sense of the world. And in occasional topics and occasional themes, yeah, we bring in the common sense that usually pervades analysis, which is usually tied to that particular theory. So we try to make those connections. It's a very difficult task, but we try to do it.
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Okay, so you're, in a sense, you're remedying a defect in the educational system. When it comes to economics in higher education, it is narrow and orthodox. You want to be open and heterodox. Why do you think the rest of economics education in the United States is so orthodox? What's the reason for that? How would you explain to a person that you were describing the situation to why it's that way?
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Well, we know that throughout the history of humanity, when systems of social thought have been developed, usually what becomes the mainstream becomes an argument for the status quo. So if you look, for example, in political theory in the 17th century, those turbulent times of the British English Revolution, Civil War, counter revolution, you had Thomas Hobbes making an argument for the English monarchy. If you look in a discipline like philosophy, a couple of centuries later, you have Hegel making a whole argument about the virtues of. Of the development of rational thought embedded, embodied in the Prussian state, in the Prussian monarchy. And now in economics, what we have is precisely mainstream, orthodox neoclassical economics making apologetic defense with no basic criticisms of how the system works in terms of this is the best we can have. So in that sense, we try to participate in undermining what becomes a mainstream that appeals to science and the processes of science in terms of why is it that they occupy that hegemonic role? They appeal to this. Let's use the term positivism in terms of science advances on the basis, to quote Paul Samuelson, who quoted Max Planck, in terms of what was that? Death by death, economics makes progress, or something like that. As if everybody agrees that these theories have been refuted. So we have to move on and attempt. So we question those discourses that also, for example, appeal to methods such as extreme use of math and statistics, because supposedly math and statistics imply some sort of rigor consistency, and therefore they equate it with the truth. So we also have those sensibilities about method in connection to politics and the system of ideas prevalent in a society. So to answer your question is very, very difficult. But we do know that the answer to that question is not that positivistic vision that is exposed to most students in terms of how the social sciences advance through time in societies that are populated by ideas that are consistently contending with each other.
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A
So it's interesting to me to hear you say particularly that in every historical period there has in fact been contestation between points of view that affirm the inevitability, the superiority of the status quo, and theories that say, no, we can do better as human beings than this system or this structure, and we have at least to discuss whether that's the case, how it might be done, and so on. The orthodoxy in the United States want to have that conversation, which is typical of orthodoxies. So there has to be a bit of a fight. So you are, or at least let me ask you to react to the notion you are in a bit of a fight with the profession to open it up.
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B
Yeah, we're trying to just follow those historical moments that I mentioned before in terms of opening up a discipline that has been very, very extreme, explicit in the way it demeanors, alternative perspectives, and how it basically has developed a self referential framework in terms of the institutions like universities, academic journals, systems of evaluating, promotions within departments, and in the worst cases, just making life impossible for alternatives. So just to give you an example of one school within heterodoxy that you mentioned, Marxism in the 1950s and 60s, my understanding is that there was just one tenured professor in the United States which turned out to be one of your professors, Paul Baran in Stanford. And my understanding is that they made his life impossible, giving him all types of trouble just to make his life hell, while at the same time celebrating like, hey, we have a token Marxist here. What are you talking about? We have alternative perspectives. So we're trying to break open by not having a token heterodox or radical political economies, but having a whole institution based on it. So if you look at the composition of our faculty, you'll see that many of them actually come from institutions that explicitly expose their students at the undergraduate and graduate level to alternatives to the mainstream.
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A
So that brings me to my next question. Yours is not going to then be the only place in America where a student can learn more than the orthodoxy. There are others, you are adding to them, is that correct?
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B
Yeah, we're just part of a tradition of dissent.
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A
Part.
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B
I guess that something that does separate us is that in many heterodox departments, without mentioning names that actually celebrate their heterodoxy at the graduate level when it comes to undergraduate teaching, they're more or less still pretty standard. So our starting point was heterodoxy from the undergraduate level. And now thanks again to the work of many of our colleagues and the support of the administration, now we're offering the same alternative now at the more advanced graduate level of the master's degree.
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A
What's your argument for a student who might be considering where he or she is going to do master's level economic studies? Why should such a student, in your judgment, choose a heterodox program? What are the advantages that make that a more desirable choice than going to the conventional, the more conventional route?
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B
Well, just to use a concrete example of our own students at the undergraduate level, most of our students come from a working class background. I say that because in a sense, like in classes like political economy, where they're exposed to Karl Marx and his thought, in a sense, we're not teaching them anything new. They know and they feel and they understand that what's written in that book written 150 years ago, pretty much describes many of the things that they have to pass through in their everyday lives. What the book does is to organize those experiences that they have in a coherent way that also makes them feel empathy and with others that are either in their same workplace outside of New York City and around the world to understand the system as a whole. And the reality like that. And our experience has been that students get very excited about it. They want to go into things like journalism. They want to, they want to encounter alternative viewpoints, be it in politics, culture, economics, with the grounding that they have theoretically in alternative economic theories. So some of them want to confront the world. Other students, for example, just want to be very sincere. They want to make a lot of money and they understand if I want to make a lot of money, I have to understand how the system works. So it may sound like a paradox or contradiction, but many people who go into finance also benefit from reading Karl Marx. That's something, well, should be a topic for another program we have in terms of the background of our graduate students. We have not only do they not come, half of them from economics, they come from sociology, anthropology. So we also focus on the interdisciplinary aspect of a heterodox education, which provides basically the tools to go out to the world and be a critical, well rounded citizen that actively seeks to intervene in this world that is falling apart, which is part of our mission, try to combat those things, tendencies right now. So it's an uphill struggle. But we benefit from the types of students that we have, and we have benefited from the Students that have come from outside of John Jay College, outside of the CUNY system, that are interested in this and in terms of job prospects. It goes all over the place. From continuing work at the PhD level, working for government organizations, non governmental organizations, journalism. We have a couple of journalists, one of them from the sister institution of Economic update, the Left out podcast, Dante Dalla Valley. We have another journalist writing for the interested very good pieces on the crisis in Puerto Rico. Her name is Kate Aronoff. We have an undergraduate student, his name is Nathan Tankus, who has been cited by one of your guests here, Stephanie Kelton. So we have a very interesting group and rich environment to push the boundaries of the discipline in terms of alternatives within economics and outside the spectrum of the discipline itself.
- [46:25]
A
Let me ask you, because sometimes when I talk to people about heterodox economics, I get the impression that they think if you're interested in that, it will bring you into tremendous conflict either with the administrations of universities or make it difficult for your graduates to get jobs. Let me ask you then about this. Is there a problem that in the CUNY system, the City University of New York, with your going in this direction, has that occasioned any difficulty, or do they welcome this kind of opening?
- [47:01]
B
Well, our immediate experience, not even at the graduate level, at the undergraduate level, is that we've graduated students, sent them to sister departments, they come back, work for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, some of them come back and teach for us. So the opportunities are there. And the employers are also interested in precisely a broader spectrum of analysis, not this mass production of the same. That's what the education system usually pops out on a yearly basis. So even though there's of course, the constraints of public education, the cuts in public spending, funding and all of that, which of course amounts to real constraints, we're working through those things. So our students do have the opportunities. We have the anecdotal evidence that they will not be wasting their time either professionally in terms of again, making a buck or contesting the system itself.
- [47:56]
A
So it hasn't been a problem for your graduates. What about the university administration? Is this okay? Well, because sometimes professors who might want to go in that direction are frightened that they will encounter some sort of disapproval if they do that.
- [48:13]
B
Well, our program in part has been a product of a turn at John Jay College towards more of a liberal arts education. So in that sense, the economics department was more than welcome. And then within the context of the crisis, this heterodox approach even opened arms to us. So at least within the John Jay College, that has not been a problem at all. It's been very supportive. We have lots of fantastic colleagues from other departments that are very supportive, extremely supportive so far. No major stumbling blocks along the way.
- [48:49]
A
Tell me a little bit so that people understand about your students at John Jay. And I would guess they're not all that different from the students that come to many of the campuses of the City University of New York. How does your program, in a sense, at least in part, focus on what they need and who they are?
- [49:12]
B
So the topics addressed in the department, topics like inequality, poverty, instability in the job, household dynamics, international dynamics, all of these things are part of the experiences of our students. Many of them are, for example, the first member in their family to go to college. Many of them are the main source of income of their family. So that's very common throughout the CUNY system, very common. At John Jay, which is also a Hispanic serving institution, a substantial amount of students are from Hispanic background and all of that. So they have to deal with things like immigration in terms of the history of their families. So we deal with those things within the current context of the Trump administration and within the larger context of the historical development of the United States and the development of global capitalism. So in that sense, we're directly connected with those experiences in terms of precisely providing theories that actually do explicitly address those problems. So if you take some versions of the mainstream, they will tell you, inequality doesn't matter. What's really important is poverty. So we tackle those problems, we show them. What does it mean to make that? What consequences does it have in terms of the workings of the system at the economic level, at the political level, et cetera. So in that sense, we think that we're very relevant to their daily experiences, both individually, in relationship to their families, their neighborhoods, et cetera.
- [50:41]
A
You know, it strikes me, listening to you, that when I went to college, I tried to take some economics courses because I was so interested in what was happening to the economy, but I found them utterly irrelevant. They were all mathematical technical exercises. Since I had come from a background in the natural sciences and mathematics. I was basically blown away by the fact that economics, the way it was taught to me, was more like an engineering course and didn't talk about the current problems that I was interested in. And so I tended to shy away. I had to come back. I studied economics despite the way it was taught, not because of it. I would have been enthralled by a program that began by saying, the student has a whole raft of economic realities he and she have to wrestle with a good economics education begins by dealing with those and facing those and drawing out different ways of explaining those so that people really can get a handle on their own situation. If that's what you're trying to do, then it's not just a disagreement with orthodoxy. It really is a different philosophy of education.
- [52:01]
B
Yeah, I mean, that was my experience also, even though I came from a business school background.
- [52:06]
A
Yourself?
- [52:07]
B
Myself, yeah. And the class that hooked me up to economics was a course on business cycles. And then I went to do a master's degree and I got exposed to that fetishism, let's call it, of the tools that economists are taught. So just to give you a quick example of how this manifested, I was present in a master's thesis dissertation where the topic was the Socioeconomic Determinants of Crime in Puerto Rico. And you know, when you see that type of title, usually it means that they're going to use statistics. It econometrics, identify certain variables, find the data through time, run a regression check which of the variables are statistically significant, and then make a story about it. The person presenting the topic found that the level of income was not statistically significant. So he proceeded to write his whole master's thesis on the basis of that. When he presented his thesis, somebody raised his hands. A political economist, actually, that was taught in a heterotics department, a dear colleague and professor that you know, in Puerto Rico. And he asked the question that you're saying that this variable, the level of income in relationship to how you're defining crime, is not important, but if you actually look at the people who are in jail for committing the crime, as you described it, they clearly are part of the profile of this strata of the income. How do you deal with that? That didn't even pass through the head of the person. And the ICO advisor who was a renowned economist who said hero, is somebody like Gary Becker, trained at the University of Chicago. So it's clear that they don't have these sensibilities for asking the right questions, and they just let the theory vomit reality without questioning the method, the tools, or being even conscious that there are alternative ways and methods of doing stuff. So that consciousness is also very important for us in exposing our students to alternative viewpoints.
- [53:52]
A
You know, it makes you wonder when you hear stories like this, whether the real function of economic the orthodoxy really wasn't to understand what's going on, but to justify it, to celebrate it, to make it all look terribly well organized beyond improvement. It's remarkable. Anyway, I want to thank you very much for introducing our audience to the heterodox idea and the heterodox program that you're developing. And I wish you every success in attracting students and in giving them the benefit of this kind of openness. So thank you very much, Ian, for coming.
- [54:34]
B
Thank you so much, Rick, and to your audience and please tune in and search for our department, John Jay College, City University of New York Economics Department.
- [54:42]
A
Good. Thank you folks. I want to also thank all of you for participating, for listening, for watching. I want to thank you to be partners of us to share what you get on this program with other people through all the mechanisms of social media and in your daily conversation with family members, co workers and so forth. I want to also thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that's been a partner with Economic Update for many, many years. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam. Sa.