Want a Reformation?

REBECCA L. SPANG

Something is happening in economics. Last December a group of academics and media commentators affixed “33 Theses for an economics reformation” to the doors of the LSE. Claiming that Economics classes today give students a single, neoclassical (or “orthodox”) version of the Truth – which has become, according to the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf, “something very like a secular religion” – the reformers challenged the discipline’s fundamental teachings. Markets, they claimed, may not be efficient. Prices do not send clear messages. Humans have motives other than greed. Salvation – not just of ourselves and families, but of society and the planet – may require faith and morality as well as deeds.