Post Autistic Economics

Ilmu Ekonomi, semestinya, adalah ilmu sosial, yang bertujuan memahami fakta-fakta (sosial ekonomi) serta memberikan rekomendasi kebijakan dalam rangka memecahkan berbagai masalah pokok. Sehingga, peralatan rumit yang berbasis pada matematika hanyalah soal cara atau metode yang membantu memahami fakta-fakta tersebut.

Dan bukan sebaliknya, tenggelam dalam kerumitan serta justru menjauh dari fakta konkritnya. Maka dari itu, ilmu ekonomi harus dikembalikan pada akarnya ilmu sosial-nya.

Itulah kira-kira cita-cita gerakan post autistic economics (PAE) yang berkembang di Cambridge dan beberapa sekolah di Prancis (ENS).

Keterangan selengkapnya: http://www.paecon.net/

Six winners of the Bank of Sweden Prize for Economics have written as follows.

". . . economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems"
Milton Friedman

“[Economics as taught] in America's graduate schools... bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science.”
Joseph Stiglitz

"Existing economics is a theoretical [meaning mathematical] system which floats in the air and which bears little relation to what happens in the real world"
Ronald Coase

“We live in an uncertain and ever-changing world that is continually evolving in new and novel ways. Standard theories are of little help in this context. Attempting to understand economic, political and social change requires a fundamental recasting of the way we think”
Douglass North

“Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas […] Year after year economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data”
Wassily Leontief

“Today if you ask a mainstream economist a question about almost any aspect of economic life, the response will be: suppose we model that situation and see what happens…modern mainstream economics consists of little else but examples of this process”
Robert Solow


Post-Autistic Economics is about changing this state of affairs.

"Economics is supposed to be social science, i.e. an intellectual discipline resting upon empirically-observed facts, in which mathematics and conceptual frameworks are tools for understanding. But in contemporary mainstream economics, the tools are often in the driver's seat, declaring evident facts impossible and reducing the subtleties of the real world to whatever clockwork economists best know how to build. Post-Autistic economics is the attempt to escape the tyranny of these tools and build new ones that will work properly."
Ian Fletcher

“Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.”
Mark Blaug