Why Economists Don't Read Marx

From Art Carden at DOL:

Why don't economists read Marx anymore?  Here's my letter to The Chronicle Review:

Russel Jacoby raises several interesting and important points about the apparently conspicuous absence of Freud, Hegel, and Marx from their respective disciplines ("Gone, and Being Forgotten," July 25). I cannot speak to the marginalization of Freud in psychology and Hegel in philosophy, but I can speak to why economists no longer read Marx: for the most part, we don't read him because he contributed nothing of lasting value to the discipline. My undergraduate comparative economic systems professor referred to Marxian economics as having been "stillborn." Thomas Sowell correctly points out that "there is no major premise, doctrine, or tool of analysis in economics today that derived from the writings of Karl Marx" and quotes Paul Samuelson's assessment of Marx as "a minor post-Ricardian."

As I prepare to teach a course entitled "Classical and Marxian Political Economy" this Spring--for which I now plan to assign Jacoby's article, I might add--I would be the first to agree that one's education should include a broad historical overview of the ideas in a particular discipline. I further agree that Marx is an important figure in the history of ideas. He plays a minor role in economics, however, because he has been thoroughly refuted.

That's an accurate assessment.  Economics is a social science that examines rational, self-interested thought (i.e. how beings behave when they compare the costs and benefits of actions).  An economics education, especially at the graduate school level, prepares students to perform economic research and consists of the learning of the tools and language of economic analysis.  While History of Thought is a useful undergraduate class for the reasons listed by Carden, its usefulness is not so great in learning the techniques of economics modeling. 

Whether you think that's a bad thing or a good thing depends on whether you thing you put the emphasis on social or the emphasis on science.

Comments

[Donald A. Coffin]

I must admit that I am sorry to see the history of economic thought disappearing from grad school curricula. Having an understanding of how the discipline has developed seems to me to be useful, especially as a lot of the strands of thought from the past (not only Marx, but the naive quantity theory fo money) continue to pop us.

In chemistry, understanding disciplinary history probably is irrelevant (or at least my brother the chem e PhD tells me so), but in the social sciences--econ, sociology, psychology, and so on, I think that's less true. Becausee the past--the fallacies, the idiocies, the false starts--does come back to bite us.