The Irrelevance of Equilibrium Economics

By the early 1970s there was widespread discontent with the state of academic economics. To a very large extent this was a product of the radical student movement of the previous decade, which produced a generation of young graduate researchers and junior academic staff whose thorough-going rejection of neoclassical economics was ideologically informed, with (somewhat tangled) roots in Marxist, feminist and populist thought. Mainstream economists still remember those years with discomfort (Barber 1996, p. 24). They were one or two spectacular converts, like the prominent monetary theorist John Gurley, who defended radical economics and denounced the complacency of the neoclassicals at the 1970 meetings of the American Economic Association (AEA) (Gurley 1971). Movements such as the Union for Radical Political Economics (founded in 1968) in the United States, and the Conference of Socialist Economists (founded in 1970) in the United Kingdom, were widely supported, especially by younger economists. They successfully established journals — the Review of Radical Political Economics and the Conference’s Bulletin, soon renamed Capital and Class — for the dissemination of radical ideas (Lee 2001, 2007).