A brief personal history: I had the good fortune to study Economics at Cambridge (as good a place as any to do it if you must), but I didn’t really follow it up. The main reason for that being disillusionment.
Firstly, I noticed that the profession was lacking in integrity: however you might prefer the world to work, it seemed as though you could hire an economist who would justify your prejudices and cloak them in a shroud of academic respectability. Physicist Max Tegmark found much the same thing, see Our Mathematical Universe page 10-11.
Secondly, I felt, for want of a better term, uneducated. My cack-handed remedial solution was to do a second degree in Philosophy. I wanted to learn how to think straight.
Thirdly, I concluded that Economics was much less fun than rock and roll, so I pursued the latter with my customary laconic vigour. Having achieved nano-cult status in the field, I consider it a good decision. When the world around me becomes too insane to contemplate I can always just pick up a guitar…
A change of heart about all this started with the financial crash of 2008, and was then reinforced by events surrounding Brexit. I was emailing friends and relations, commenting online, generating ideas, and becoming attuned once more to the interface between Economics and Politics – the murky world of political economy.
Why ‘heterodox’? perhaps because I have come to see eccentricity as the only path to truth when ‘the centre’ becomes an elaborately encoded lie. Moreover, I have increasingly fallen back on other explanatory models when the Economics/Politics interface seems to have exhausted any appeal to reason. At such times I find it necessary to stand a long way back, rather as a social anthropologist might, in seeking to explain human behaviour.
Eventually I was looking for a way to organise my thoughts, to record them in a reasonably structured way. As a recent Nobel laureate once remarked, ‘ I need a dump-truck to unload my head.’ This blog is my dump-truck.