Meme Wars

Be part of the exciting revolution underway in economic science.

This book breaks the mathematical spell of mainstream economics and infuses it with some much-needed improvisational jazz. It features thinkers, ideas and models - bionomics, psychonomics, degrowth - that have been purged from the leading econ departments across the Western world.

Meme Wars will be launched November 13 by Seven Stories Press in the US, Random House in Canada, Penguin in the UK, and Reimann in Germany.

We hope it riles you up and catalyzes a revolt against the suicidal formalism they are currently being taught. A number of such campus revolts - especially at Harvard, University of Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago - could trigger a larger uprising against the keepers of global economic orthodoxy.


Want to be part of this revolution in economic science?


This is the plan:

Put your university at the forefront of a monumental shift in the theoretical foundations of economic science, now underway. If you can overhaul the economics department at your school, then eventually, together, we can shift the paradigm. History shows us that this is exactly how revolutions in thought have happened in the past. Students, it is in your power to shift the theoretical foundations of economic science.


This is how it works:

Bring analysis to action with this easy step - converge upon Kickitover.org, download a poster, print it, and post it in the corridors of your campus and beyond. We're aiming to ignite a raging meme war not just on campus, but across the entire mindscape . . .

Students, imagine how your profs will respond when you start demanding answers to questions such as these: How do you measure progress, Mr. Professor? How does climate change factor into our study of economics? Is economic progress killing the planet? Does economics suffer from physics envy . . . is it even an exact science?

Let's pull off the ultimate jam for the fate of humanity . . . A paradigm shift in the theoretical foundations of economic science!

Check out the review in the Guardian online, or check out some of our Kickitover campaign posters in the spread about Meme Wars in the hard-copy of the Guardian: here.

Now go to Kickitover.org and start jamming!


Source:
www.adbusters.org/blogs/meme-wars-launch.html


More about Meme Wars:

Hey all you students out there, you are entering university at a critical juncture. Capitalism is in crisis and the crisis is growing ever deeper. The inability of economists to incorporate externalities into their models and to account for phenomena such as species extinction, resource depletion and climate change - not to mention the 2008 financial meltdown that blindsided them all - has turned the profession into a target for derision and ridicule. And it's not just some academic joke - today even ordinary people look down their noses at the ineptitude of economics.

And yet as you delve into your textbooks, listen to the sensible, ordered tone of lectures and come to associate your professors with the accolades that hang on their walls, you may get the sense that economics is a science: a rigorous discipline with its own immutable laws, proven theories and crop of Nobel laureates. Far from it. You may be temporarily fooled by this façade, but you need only look beneath the surface to discover that economics is a highly contested field.. a profession whose axioms and credibility are being questioned like never before. The prevailing neoclassical paradigm is crumbling and a new, more chaotic, more biologically and behaviorally based paradigm is struggling to emerge.

But your department, like most others around the world, is still marching in lockstep with the old guard. That's because generations of tenured professors have marginalized dissenters and eliminated competition. Your economics department operates very much like a police state..  not a free marketplace of ideas in which innovation is acknowledged and rewarded. But outside your department, a vigorous heterodox economics thrives.. there are social economists, feminist economists, interdisciplinary economists, behavioral economists, ecological economists and hundreds of intellectuals and maverick professors who are openly critical of the neoclassical regime and fighting to overthrow it.

So there are really two ways for you to approach your studies over the next few years: you can ignore all of the screaming inconsistencies and accept the status quo. You can cross your fingers and hope the old paradigm has a generation or two left in it, enough for you to carve out a career. Or you can align yourself from the get-go with the mavericks. You can be an agitator, a provocateur, a meme warrior, an occupier, one of the students on campus who posts dissenting messages up on notice boards and openly challenges professors in class. You can bet your future on a paradigm shift.

All of us here at Adbusters hope this book fires up your imagination and inspires you to take the riskier, more exciting path.

Kalle Lasn, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics

Source:
http://kickitover.org/post/34791255380/about