Three-Toed Sloth

Inducing Disorientation in Larval Economists

Cross-posted to Crooked Timber

As a good neoclassical, neoliberal economist, Brad DeLong is acutely aware that the market system is not natural at all, but a delicate historical anomaly. He is worried that it is so familiar to his students that they will find alternate modes of social organization almost incredible; accordingly he wants to mess with their heads:

Would making Berkeley's first-year economics Ph.D. graduate students this fall read short biographies of William Gates and William Marshall as a way of getting at the idea that there are non-market societies that work very differently from our own today--would that be a teaching idea of extraordinary brilliance or of total insane lunacy?

The rest of the post is an extended excerpt from the New York Review of Books review of a biography of William Marshal (which goes on to my to-read list). The question I have is, what should DeLong make his students read, to give them a vivid sense of just how differently production and distribution could be and have been organized? Argonauts of the Western Pacific, perhaps? Gilgamesh?

And: those of us who teach things other than economics, what books do or should we hand out as ice-axes for our students' frozen seas? (This one is mine.)

The Dismal Science; The Great Transformation