dick wolf posted:

Janet Yellen, the United States' Federal Reserve's new Chair, and I were graduate economics students around the same time at Yale University. The professor who shaped the macroeconomics we learned was James Tobin. He taught us to be Keynesian economists: that is, to accept capitalism as the sole object and focus of our studies, to celebrate it as the best possible system, and to preserve it against its own serious faults. Keynesian economics teaches that to secure capitalism's blessings requires systematic government intervention in the workings of the economy.

...

Thus, after Yale, Janet Yellen and I took different paths in our approaches and experiences working within US capitalism. Ever the liberal Democrat, she endorses capitalism despite its cyclical and colossal waste of resources and the human tragedy this imposes across the globe. No courses at Yale troubled Yellen or myself with any analyses of how exploitation lies at the core of capitalist production. We were never taught that the majority of industrial workers produce more value for employers than what employers pay them. We were prevented from encountering arguments examining how this idea of "more" (or, in economic terms, of a surplus) contributed fundamentally to the systemic inequalities that define capitalist societies.

No irritating Marxism was allowed to disturb the deep, unquestioned political tranquility that professors embedded in Yale's graduate economics curriculum. The celebration of the free competitive market, although often extended rhetorically to the free marketplace of competing ideas, was suspended in the case of Marxian concepts and analyses of capitalist economies. The latter were systematically excluded at Yale as at most US universities then and ever since: no free marketplace of ideas there.