 The state of economics is essentially one in which there is a certain ideology, you can call it neoliberal, that continues to be dominant and that's essentially the purpose of economics. To use this neoliberal discourse to push certain policies around the globe. So my name is Matias Renego, I'm currently a professor at Bacchanal University. I was previously at the University of Utah for ten years and I worked for the central bank of Argentina for two years as a senior research manager. Any crisis opens up the space for, so if you look at my sort of longish reply to the question of why, what's the state of economics, the 1873 to 1893 is a big crisis, it was called the Great Depression before the Great Depression, it's also the 30s, the Great Depression is the other sort of, and the 1960s itself, 67 is, it's a period of crisis that eventually leads to inflation in the 70s and whatnot, but it's a crisis of the international system that sort of held during the golden age of capitalism. So periods of crisis are good because they sometimes lead to the opening up of possibilities for alternative discourses. But one important thing that happened in the 30s, in the period that goes from the 30s to the 60s was that we had, for good or for bad, whatever you think about the Soviet system, you had an alternative and you had that capitalist societies were concerned with the fact that, oh, maybe these guys are gonna go communist and that's a danger, so sure we're gonna acquiesce to some of the demands of labor. That didn't happen in 2008, if you go to my blog, Naked Kenjianism, there is a post which was, the blog started after the crisis, considerably after I think it's 2011, but there is a post somewhere there that I discuss, there were all of these hopes that we, in the sense that INET is about this hope that we're gonna have new economic thinking and I'm all for that and INET is an institution that is trying to create space for different kinds of alternative views on how to look at the economy. What I suggested in that post was exactly that there is a limit to how much we're gonna actually get out of this because at the end of the day, there is a sociology of the profession, so how the Kenjian revolution to some extent won space, because they won Harvard, they won Cambridge, which was central at that point, but essentially they had to win in the U.S. because the dynamic center of the economy was switching to the U.S., so they won Harvard, they won Berkeley, they didn't win in the middle in Chicago, but they win key places, MIT, which became central with Samuelson, and they eventually also entered institutions like, they were already there in some way even better with the institution that he said, but the Council of Economic Advisors, so a key moment is when Kennedy comes out and says basically the simple multiplier story works and he has people like Salo and Tobin and Okun and whatnot working for him and says, oh, we're gonna do a tax cut to increase the level of activity and whatnot, so it's taking over institutions that matters, and I don't see in this crisis any evidence that alternative ways of looking at the economy have actually taken over key positions in academia, in policymaking institutions, so there has been inroads and some acceptance from people in the mainstream, they may at a point or another say, no, this is a Minsky moment, so fair enough somebody read a little bit of Minsky, but I don't think enough to change the profession. That doesn't mean that there are not things that we can do, so there are many things that the paradox economists can do to push the debate and change the profession a little bit, but the problem we have, think of, for example, the role of unions. Unions have lost the role. Economists on the left have had some space with unions, so there are economists at EPI, think tanks in Washington DC, but the problem that their influence to some extent goes hand-in-hand with the left within the Democratic Party and sure there was Bernie and all of these things, but it's not clear where the party is going or that they will take over the party, which they'll have lots of resistance from people that more or less shared neoliberal conceptions with fellow Republicans within the Democratic Party, so it's not clear to me and it wasn't clear that this crisis would lead to significant change in the profession. I think it leads to more of the same. It leads to lots of mainstream economists that will be forced to depart from the core of the theory, which is the general equilibrium sort of markets are efficient thing, using some alternative things, so they can put something in their model and say, in the general equilibrium, whatever it is, the stochastic general equilibrium models, something that it means a little bit of that, stuff like that, and they come back and say, oh, the markets work, but there are all of these complications in the world and so we need to account for those in order to make it more accurate or whatever it is, they would say. Keynes has this famous phrase that we're all slaves of that economist and that ideas, not vested interests, govern the world and on the other hand, I think he missed the point. Neoclassical economics is the fulcrum of neoliberal political views. Vested interests have very strong influence of what happens, but at the end of the day, vested interests have to be defended that there has to be some sort of logical underlying idea of what's behind this sort of naked interest that are being austerity in order to promote concentration of income at the top, so your austerity is for the poor really. I mean, it's not austerity for everybody. There was no austerity for bankers or for risking big corporations, so one can sort of think of austerity as one of the important ideas within neoliberal policy frameworks. Another thing that it's important, it's austerity for whom. I mean, in economics, that's an important question. For whom is always the question that we should be asking, so who's benefiting, who's losing? If you have to find a theoretical foundation for neoliberal policies, the only theoretical foundation really is neoclassical marginalism. That's at the core of these ideas. So part of the role of the heterodoxy of alternative views is showing when we can, crises are very good, how the emperor is naked, how some of these ideas are absolutely bogus and can be debunked.