Understanding the Economic Crisis: The Importance of Training in Critical Economics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I am deeply honoured to deliver the second memorial lecture here at the University of Sydney in the name of Ted Wheelwright, one of the pioneers of the political economy movement. The courageous struggles to preserve a space here for critical and progressive thought were reaching their crux just as I began my undergraduate studies in economics at the University of Calgary--one of the most conservative universities in Canada--in 1979. The fact that Ted Wheelwright and his colleagues dared to establish an economics school with radical foundations, and that subsequent leaders and students would fight so hard to defend and nurture it, opened doors for me as I struggled to find alternative visions, and mentors to teach those visions, in my own economics education. The Political Economy program here became one of the most important and inspirational centres of radical economic thought in the English-speaking world. While tonight is the first opportunity I've had to visit your campus, your example, reflected in like-minded initiatives on other continents, enhanced my own intellectual and political options by expanding the terrain of debate within our stunted and ideological profession. Wheelwright's personal research agenda also had a direct relevance to the traditions of radical political economy in Canada. His focus on critically understanding the economic actions and effects of multinational corporations, and the dangers of the dependent mode of economic development characteristic of resource-abundant peripheral economies (like Australia and Canada), found immediate resonance in our own analyses of these problems. This included the thoroughly complementary work of scholars such as Mel Watkins (1963) and Kari Polanyi Levitt (1970), who wrote at about the same time as Ted of the economic and political dangers of a multinational-dominated, resource extractionoriented mode of development. Wheelwright's Australia: A Client State (with Greg Crough) could virtually have been re-issued in Canada, simply by changing the name of the country, so similar have been the circumstances of our respective trajectories of dependence. And so I would like to begin tonight by thanking all of you here in this program--professors, students and alumni--for your sustained effort, inspired by Wheelwright and the other giants who came together here to nurture and defend this space. Your efforts made a fundamental difference in my life and training. And they did likewise for many thousands of other progressive-minded economics students around the world, who know in their guts that there must be better ways to understand the economic world (and to change it), but need help finding the way. Your program remains one of the best initiatives for showing young progressive economists that way. A coherent, united and high-quality place to study radical economics is a precious, fragile asset. I am so impressed by the spirit of unity and celebration that clearly infuses this event tonight and I urge you all to continue investing the energy and care that this program needs and deserves. It is important not just for training the next generation of radical political economists, but for educating and strengthening our movements and struggles for social change. The importance of a critical economics pedagogy to those social change movements is the central topic for my presentation this evening. I consider myself an economics teacher, not just a practicing economist. I would guess that about a quarter of my work time is spent 'teaching,' in the broad sense of the term--although, unlike most in this room, I do not teach in a formal academic environment. Rather, my efforts to 'spread the word' take place among the working people who constitute the membership of my union (the Canadian Auto Workers), and the activist base of the various grass-roots movements and campaigns in which I am also engaged (as both an economist and an instructor). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".