Although neoclassical economics rests on assumptions that should have been rejected long ago, it remains the dominant orthodoxy. Three recent books, and an older one, help show why its sustainability should be seen as a scandal.

• Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison, The corruption of the economy, Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers Ltd., 2006 (first published 1994).
  Stephen A. Marglin, Raising Keynes: A General Theory of the 21st Century, Harvard University Press, 2021.
  Alessandro Roncaglia, The Age of Fragmentation: A History of Contemporary Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
  Robert Skidelsky, What is wrong with the economy? : An introduction for the perplexed, Yale University Press, 2020.

AUSTIN – Selfish economics departments at prestigious academic institutions no longer bother to teach the history of economic thought – an area I studied at Yale University in 1977, forever jeopardizing my career university. Why has the topic been dropped – and even shunned and mocked? Skeptical-minded students would not be wrong to suspect that this was for scandalous reasons (such as when, in centuries past, troublesome aunts were locked in attics).

The four books examined here each reveal parts of the scandal. Three are new, and the other, The corruption of the economy, first appeared in 1994 and republished in 2006. Its principal author, the American economist Mason Gaffney, kept his remarkable pen until his disappearance last summer at the age of 96.

Economy without history

Robert Skidelsky is a historian, epic biographer of John Maynard Keynes and a prolific debater in the UK House of Lords. He calls What’s wrong with the economy? an “alphabet book”, and it is indeed the most accessible of the four books. Skidelsky’s education in the history of economics resembles mine: a broad reading of classical authors – Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and others – followed by those associated with the “neoclassical” or “revolution” marginalist ‘of the 1870s.