Towards A New Paradigm for Economics: by: Asad Zaman, Comment by: Seif el-Din Tag el-Din نحو نموذج جديد للاقتصاد: بقلم: أسد زمان ، تعليق: سيف الدين تاج الدين

Asad Zaman departs from the widely quoted moralist critique of the neoclassical economics in its undue emphasis on wealth creation and virtual negligence of socio-economic justice. His article presents the basic problem with the neoclassical theory as being the absence of ‘poverty’ in the language of economics, which is a valid starting point, together with the premise that ‘thousands of people die of hunger when there is enough grain available locally to feed all of them’. Although ‘poverty economics’ has recently emerged as an independent field of inquiry and that the concept of ‘poverty-line’ is a by-product of it, Zaman’s point is still valid in relation to the absence of ‘poverty’ in the standard text-book approach which furnishes the educational foundation for economists. His article seems to echo the idea that unless morality is taught as part and parcel of the standard economic curriculum, the learning outcome of economics will generate professional economists who have little regard to the concept of economic justice. This is the seminal idea fervently argued by Hausman and McPherson Economic Analysis and Moral Philosophy, 2000, by reference to the scandalous behaviour of the one time World Bank chief economist who has adopted a model of cost-benefit analysis to advocate the dumping of harmful industrial waste in the poor countries! --