I’ve just recently been reading through Keen’s book, and I take your word for it that he cuts corners. That wouldn’t surprise me. As I said, he has an axe to grind, as most of us do. We have our blind spots. It’s also plausible to me that he could misinterpret the flaws in his program as evidence of a massive conspiracy against him. Outsiders might be inclined to do that.

I’d also dearly like to see some evidence to support your assessment of economists’ consensus against laissez-faire capitalism. We’ve talked about this before. My stereotype of the field that crops up from mass media presentations, pundits, and the like is that mainstream economists defend a version of capitalism that’s ultimately bad for most of the planet (one way or another). So they’re on the wrong side of history. I’ve hardly investigated the matter, though, and I’d love to be proven wrong on this. According to you, I take it, either my stereotype is just wrong, a minority view of economists gets too much attention, and/or mainstream economists are terrified of voicing their true opinion to alter the political course, especially in the US.

I agree that sophisticated math might not be suitable for undergraduate lessons, so there’s a separate pedagogical problem. However, I’m still suspicion of the need for such math in economics. Why on earth should economics be like physics? The resort to more and more exotic math does start to look like a retreat into obfuscation, which means economists would be hiding something. At least, that mathematical treatment would be suspicious unless it could be justified with real-world applications that make the world a better place and that demonstrate the scientific bona fides of economics. That’s what justifies the math in physics, the technological applications.

Would you say, then, roughly speaking, that the wealth generated by the First World over the last few centuries wouldn’t exist without the technical modelling of capitalism that’s accumulated in graduate economics textbooks? Without some way of reliably applying the models, the resort to mind-numbing math will look more theological than scientific. Again, we’ve talked about that before.

Intro to philosophy classes, by the way, also teach simplified versions of what the big-name philosophers said. The religious side of Plato is typically left out, and Hegel is attributed with Fichte’s formulation of “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” But philosophy isn’t supposed to be a science; it’s more open to interpretation anyway.

I think what Keen would want to say here is that even if the sophisticated math can’t be brought into the undergraduate classes, the entry-level texts should at least spell out in natural language that the early-modern models are oversimplifications that have been superseded, that the consensus of economists is that laissez-faire capitalism is reckless and self-destructive. Keen points out that business majors don’t go beyond that entry-level class, so they get a warped view of how economics works. And that social Darwinism seeps into mass culture, giving us the chanting of the “Greed is good” mantra.