Word: marglin
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...Marglin didn't pay any more attention to Mary as he went on to graduate studies in economics and picked up his Ph.D. in 1963. He espoused a liberal Democrat's line, arguing in 1960 with his parents--who were considerably more leftist than he that Kennedy and Nixon really were different. He didn't see much that he could change in America, so he took his Ph.D. and good intentions to India, a neo-classicist Peace Corps man. At the time, he didn't realize it, but he was joining a Harvard generation of future radical economists in Third...
...MARGLIN didn't start questioning his economics or his liberalism until 1965, when he returned to Harvard and began teaching graduate seminars. Like many of his students, he was horrified by the Vietnam War and slowly moved farther to the Left. But he was also shocked when those same students began questioning economic theory as a whole. He had though economics was a trade, with tools that were value-free and effective on both capitalist and socialist problems. Suddenly, he was forced to step back and see neoclassical economics as a system--"a description of the world, an attempt...
That hope arrived for Marglin while he was still in India, in the form of newspaper reports of the 1968 French student-worker revolt, or "the French Almost-Revolution," as Marglin calls it. "One of the central pillars of my system in terms of the lack of relationship between my economics and politics was that the capitalist system was perfect," he says. "There was going to be no change other than making it better at the margins. The crucial change was the belief that things can change, will change. Of course, you can say the French revolution didn't come...
...Before Marglin returned in 1968, he was officially awarded tenure, but several years passed before the faculty realized that they had elected a monster to their midst. Harvard had its hands full with the growing student movement, culminating in the University Hall occupation...
...faculty's reaction to the occupation suddenly showed Marglin how hypocritical and shallow the University could be, adding to his political discontent. But Marglin was a radical without radical economics--he had no alternatives to neoclassical theory to offer, and felt he "couldn't reject the only thing I had." IN 1969, one graduate student asked him. "How come if you're as radical as all this, you're doing all this neoclassical crap?" He answered. "If all you can do is fiddle while Rome is burning, then you fiddle." Two years later, the same grad student heard Marglin speak...