LITMIR.BIZ

      Acknowledgments

      "If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write."– Martin Luther King Jr.

      Tara and I met in Tampa Florida; she had embarked on a great career that requires long hours on her feet but provided the financial security that her parents, Haitian immigrants, have dreamed of. In contrast, I was a hippy lunatic idealist, which the old man found outlandish. Somehow, I was able to convince her to parachute out of her stable and bright quotidian life to join me on the dark side. What got into her head to gamble on me and graduate school prospects? As diabolic speculations gained traction, we relocated to the north-eastern part of United States; what a relief.

      Our first snow day was interesting, to say the least. It was the first time Tara gave me the "serial killer look," holding a sharp knife, and didn't say a word for a minute. Bear in mind that even in my sleep, I would throw a tantrum denouncing the increasing gap between the "have a lot" and the "have squat" all over the globe. Little did I know, my lovely wife was fed up with my homilies and wailings of the global social, commerce and trade, and political malaise, and more-so of my plans to present to the world what I believe is the remedy. Sure, I jotted down notes on gazillions of papers that laid like dead leaves on our office floor but stopping short of mustering the energy and discipline to complete a manuscript. A family friend even suggested that I put my ideas into a book so that I can amass followers. Build a cult? A preposterous idea, at the time. As much as it pains me to admit it, Tara was right. I had talked the talk for years, it was about time that I walked the walk, or in this case, written the write.

      Why is the title of this book not "Economics Codex Gigas?" Well, Nassau Senior beat me to writing the economic devil's bible. Economic Jihad? Your slothful mind could be rushing to an inevitable conclusion right now. Chill pills will be handy on this journey; this book excavates long-standing challenges that generations of indolent economists and their groupies have suppressed or pointed in the wrong direction for two centuries. It is neither a clandestine parody nor a callous demonstration of prowess, but a genuine and provocative dissection of our world and the economic discipline.

      Other than my anger and anxiety, I have to thank people that happen to sit next to me in greyhound buses during my frequent exhausting commutes, and with whom I had some of the most memorable discussions of my existence. Among them, a head of a University who had really harsh words for the Nobel Prize economist, Milton Friedman, for coming from a humble Jewish family beginning in New York City and "turning into an asshole" (his words). To my special sauce of ingredients, friends, and foes who have been driven by the insatiable appetite of proving my ideas were crazy; you have helped me strengthen my arguments and conviction. I love you, ladies and gentlemen.

      Most of all, I am more than thankful for my wife, my partner in crime, for her excessive but effective tactics instrumental for me to undertake the daunting task of writing this book.

      Foreword

      The relevance of heterodox economics is more than ever before threatened. Already, a number of heterodox economic programs have been disbanded. If the institutions that are immersed in this school of economic thought stay on the same track and don’t adjust their goal from producing economists who aspire to become successful theoreticians, thinkers, to whom are going to become accomplished pragmatists, reasoning humans, their role in this global competitive academia will become obsolete. The end of heterodox economics might also be the best thing for the revival of institutionalism or even better, institutions’ adoption and dissemination of Ethosism, a more lucid and relevant moral stream.

I

      Interlude I

      "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's for everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

      This inspiring quote by Marianne Williamson is from her book A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles, Harper Collins, 1992. From Chapter 7, Section 3 (Pg. 190-191). Even though Nelson Mandela never uttered this quote in his 1994 inaugural speech, for my generation, it is forever attached to the man. If something has to be objectively said about his one term as the President of South Africa, his cowardly rainbow approach on dissolving apartheid had made him the white South African bourgeois champion. And, of course, if one simply tries to look at him within the context of a man who spent twenty-seven years in prison without begging his masters for a pardon or cracking the skull of another inmate, he, in essence, deserves to be held as one of the mythical figures of the power of conviction who exemplifies the strength of character required in the struggle against social, commerce and trade, and political inequality. What other better way to limp into the next phase of this expedition?

      1

      Introduction

      "Art is an attempt to integrate evil."– Simone de Beauvoir

      I do not listen to compact discs. I play old tunes on vinyl. Perusing through thrift stores in search of a Sam Cooke, a Wendo Kolosoy, a Thelonious Monk, an Eduardo Sanchez de Fuentes, a Jimmie Rodgers, a Notorious B.I.G, a Mikhail Glinka, a Mariam Makeba, a Nana Mouskouri, a Fela Kuti, a Claude Debussy, or a Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev is as soothing as yoga. I treasure authentic Peruvian folklore music beats and Mongolian musical instruments more than a pop artist funk

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