How can academics demonstrate the importance of theory to our understandings of the contemporary socio-political environment and the practices that constitute everyday life? Well, the folks over at Econstories.tv have taken revealing how theory relates to practice as their mission in order to help people learn about economics. Their first effort is an incredibly clever and well-produced video that introduces the arguments of John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek in an accessible and entertaining way.
Now just because the video is highly amusing doesn't mean that it can be simply taken at face value. There is a very clear--and rather disingenuous-- underlying political message about the superiority of neo-classical economic theory.
First, an implicit message is being conveyed that somehow it was Keynesians who are responsible for the global economic crisis of the past three years. One can call people like Allan Greenspan, Gordon Brown, George W. Bush, and others whose unwavering belief in financial deregulation formed the architectural blueprint of the economic crisis many things, but Keynesians would not be one of them.
Second, while we get to see the 'morning after' of Keynesian macro-economics, we don't get to see the negative effects of Hayek's blend of neo-classical economics that manages to combine both a paranoid vision of human nature with a naive belief in the power of markets to self-regulate. Then again, it's probably difficult to convey rising economic inequality, the attempted dissolution of the public sphere, and the further immiseration of the global poor (i.e., all the things that have occurred since neo-classical economics became the dominant paradigm in the early 1980s) into the genre of a hip-hop battle video.
If you are interested in learning more about the weird world of F.A. Hayek, I would recommend the following videos. The first (above) is based on a booklet produced by General Motors summarizing the 'Road to Serfdom'.
The second is a three part BBC documentary called 'The Trap' produced by Adam Curtis which examines in detail the legacy of Hayekian thought and its detrimental impacts of personal freedom and well-being.
Comments