Understanding capitalism

10 Nov, 2014 at 09:28 | Posted in Economics | 2 Comments

Frank Roosevelt, a member of the Sarah Lawrence economics faculty since 1977, likens his field to the elephant a group of blind scholars famously tried to describe. Each felt a different part of the animal, and so described a different beast.

“There is no objective truth in economics,” says Roosevelt. “Nobody understands the whole picture. Everybody gets a piece of it.”

In February, Oxford University Press published the third edition of the introductory economics textbook Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, Roosevelt’s six-and-a-half-year project of rewriting and revision. It’s an untraditional book. Roosevelt is an untraditional economist.

“I’m not like ninety-nine percent of economists in the world—I’m in the one percent that is self-styled ‘radical,’” he says. “‘Alternative’ is a more sanitized word.”

Each year, about a million college students take introductory economics courses; their textbooks are selected from among some two dozen on the market. But this apparent magnitude of choices, Roosevelt says, belies the sameness in their explanation of economics. “Class,” for example, is not an independent entry in the index of the most popular traditional textbook. “In our book,” says Roosevelt, “class is not only in the index, but it has more references to it than almost any other word.

”There are power groups, power interests, and much of the world is made up of power relationships. Class is about power relations. We think introductory courses should educate people about the economic system in which we live. This concept is central to this book, and that’s what makes it different.”

As a student in the 60’s, Roosevelt was involved in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, and co-founded a group called the Union for Radical Political Economics. The first edition of Understanding Capitalism (1985) was written by two friends from the Union’s early days, Samuel Bowles and Richard Edwards. Roosevelt began using it right away, giving it equal course time with more traditional textbooks and introducing, he concedes, “a lot of cognitive dissonance” into his classes.

J.B.