Seventy students walked out of Greg Mankiw's Economics 10 course at Harvard [this is the basic intro econ course] to protest the rightwing pro-rich bias of the course. One needs to recall that Martin Feldstein, when teaching the course years ago, told students that the aim of the course was to explain that the market works -- not how the market works, but that it works! This is the same Economics Department that denied tenure more than thirty years ago to young, brilliant Samuel Bowles, who then joined the UMass Economics Department and became the leading radical economist in the United States.
Harvard is always behind the curve, of course, inasmuch as it is essentially an intellectual backwater, but it is lovely to see students even there responding to the new winds that are blowing in America. Now if they would only find somewhere better to aim for after graduation than Wall Street!
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Dear Professor Wolff,
As I'm sure you know, Mankiw took the course over from Feldstein in the 90s. Since then, all of the radical sections of Ec 10 have been abolished and literally no discussion of Marx, or the historical contingency of neoclassical economics is included in Mankiw's textbook. While this is of course not much of a surprise, it does show an increased intolerance for even alternative viewpoints in the economics courses at Harvard (for example, even Samuelson's introductory text contained at least some discussion of comparative systems and Marxian economics).
Partly in response to this, a group of us has started up a project blog entitled /Anti-Mankiw/ which is meant to be in the spirit of Marc Linder's classic critique of Samuelson's intro book, /Anti-Samuelson/. A link to the blog is here: http://anti-mankiw.blogspot.com/
It would be great to hear more of your views on how economics was taught at Harvard when you were there, as well as any thoughts you have about this new blog we have started up. In particular, given the popularity of your blog, some mention of the Anti-Mankiw blog link in a post of yours would really help get the word out!
I've been a huge fan of your blog, especially the tutorials. Thanks and take care!
Daniel MacDonald
UMass Econ PhD student
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