16 very good left-wing economists

[buritobr]

I wrote an article about the life and the work of 16 very good left-wing economists: Rudolf Hilferding, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Douglas, Michal Kalecki, Piero Sraffa, Gunnar Myrdal, Raul Prebisch, Joan Robinson, Oskar Lange, Paul Sweezy, Celso Furtado, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Yanis Varoufakis, Thomas Piketty. The article is in Portuguese, but I post here for the ones who can read https://voyager1.net/economia/economistas-de-esquerda/

I had the intention to write against the myth that only conservative economists are good economists

[136or142]

I wrote an article about the life and the work of 16 very good left-wing economists: Rudolf Hilferding, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Douglas, Michal Kalecki, Piero Sraffa, Gunnar Myrdal, Raul Prebisch, Joan Robinson, Oskar Lange, Paul Sweezy, Celso Furtado, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Yanis Varoufakis, Thomas Piketty. The article is in Portuguese, but I post here for the ones who can read https://voyager1.net/economia/economistas-de-esquerda/

I had the intention to write against the myth that only conservative economists are good economists

I don't know of a single good conservative economist since Milton Friedman.

Of course, if you consider mainstream centrist neo classical economists as conservatives, then that's a bit different.

[mvd10]

Someone like Paul Krugman probably is closer to your average neoclassical economist than to the Marxists.

Was there really a myth about only conservative economists being good? Most economists support deregulating (most) markets and they generally oppose French-style taxes on labour and capital but they also see income inequality as an issue, they see market failures as real, almost all of them support Keynesian stimulus in times of crisis and they're not as sold on tax cuts as the GOP. From what I know economists in the US are about 70/30 D, and Dutch economists usually vote for D66 (centrist liberal party, they lean slightly to the right on economic issues). I guess you could compare D66 to the DLC Democrats.

[buritobr]

Where's Ha-Joon Chang?

Ha-Joon Chang can not be considered a leftist. He said that he would be considered left-wing in the UK and right-wing in South Korea.
He supports the interventionist policies like the ones implemented by the military dictatorship in South Korea. Chang said that the rich countries implemented free trade and respect to intelectual property only after they became rich, but he also said that these countries created the welfare state only after they became rich.

[parochial boy]

An anecdote comes to mind about the professor, who when asked by a student if he though free trade was a good thing, responded with something along the lines of "well it depends on the context, the economic situation, the political situation, the strength of domestic industries, currency stability, inequality... and so on"

But when asked the same question by a journalist, responded with "yes, free trade is a good think"

The point being, that, although some economists obviously do have ideological preferences; and the discipline at large has done enourmous damage to its own credibility by signing up blindly to certain neo-classical , overly mathematically based models, economists by and large are aware of the ambiguity that surrounds any social science.

[Sadader]

Where's Ha-Joon Chang?

Ha-Joon Chang is a complete joke, especially when you compare him to actual (left wing) economists like Piketty