A revealing account of why mainstream economic thinking is fundamentally flawed

7/22/2009 9:11:56 AM #

It's about time! Anthropologists and sociologists have been saying that for decades!  As social scientists who study human behavior on the ground/in communities -- life as people live it -- we have tried to raise to economists at conference after conference the lack of fit between their analyses of usually macro-level data and people's real lives. The tragedy is that political leaders pay attention to what economists say, but tend to ignore the beharioral scientists. Thus, they make plans that emanate from economists' theorizing and that often fail when applied to field siutations. Happily, in the Philippines, many of our economists are now attuned to socio-cultural realities, more than in the past. They need to educate their US- and Europe-based counterparts on the genuine need for interdisciplinary collaboration with sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, among others, and field exposure to real people living real lives.

Mary RAcelis

Mary Racelis