A Nobel Prize in Economics - Do You Know Someone Who Has the Time?

By: Robert Diamond May. 23, 2017

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 23, 2017 /PRNewswire/ Canadian Philip McShane, author of Economics for Everyone: Das Jus Kapital and Profit: The Stupid View of President Donald Trump, and twice nominated for the Templeton Award, is searching for an economist who is interested in winning a Nobel Prize in economics.

This is not a joke.

It is not a joke that the total wealth of the current cabinet of men in the U.S., drunk on expansion, is equal to that of the bottom third of the nation's population. In a recent town hall meeting that aired a week ago on CNN, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke of the inequality: "... there is something profoundly wrong when we live in a nation in which the top 1 percent, 0.1 percent, owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. And we've got 43 million people living in poverty."

What is not discussed in town halls, not agreed upon, and certainly not taught, is how orthodox economics has helped create a situation in which "the metabolism of our economy is now on a collision course with the metabolism of our planet." (Stewart Brand, quoting the Australian biologist Tim Flannery.)

So, what is to be done to identify and remedy the decadence, now embedded in institutions and policies, resulting from an "economic theory that has hung around our little-incomed necks for more than three centuries"? (Economics for Everyone, p. i)

Sadly, fake news runs deeper than a belief in "trickle-down economics." Well-intentioned economists and advisors suffer from a massive psychic closure within a long tradition of a single-flow analysis, out of which swamp has emerged financial monsters.

Trump is poised to play that voodoo to the hilt, but the World Bank and the IMF are in the same ball park, and people like Piketty in his ongoing publishing and Stiglitz in his recent book The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe(2016) are only puttering along around the same voodoo. (An Interview with Philip McShane)

It is highly unlikely that @SenSanders or @VanJones68 has the time, but you (yes, you Bernie; and you Van) might know someone with the time and talent to win the Nobel Prize. Likewise, it is unlikely that @JosephEStiglitz or @paulkrugman (Nobel Prize winner 2008) are interested. They would have to revisit and rethink their education in economics, which could be more than time-consuming.

Might you know an economist unconvinced that daily business news has much of anything to do with democratic economics, someone mildly displaced, with "a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious" (Alfred North Whitehead) in a fresh way, and willing to implement the basics of two-flow analysis?

Philip McShane (D.Phil., Oxford University, 196568) was trained in mathematical physics, and later studied philosophy, theology, and economics. He has written extensively in diverse areas, including evolutionary theory, linguistics, economics, and methodology. His prior books on economics include Wealth of Self & Wealth of Nations (1974), Lonergan's Challenge to the University and the Economy (1980), Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics: A Fresh Pragmatism (2000), Beyond Establishment Economics: No Thank You, Mankiw (with Bruce Anderson, 2002), Sane Economics and Fusionism (2010), Piketty's Plight and the Global Future (2014), and Profit: The Stupid View of President Donald Trump (2016). McShane has lectured on economics at universities in Mexico, Columbia, USA, Canada, Ireland, UK, Korea, Australia, and India.