Read on Twitter
As an undergrad at Harvard, I had the privilege of learning economics from the Big Names. The mainstream textbook writers. The World Bank presidents. The White House advisors.
Like many others, I came into college with some radical instincts. Most of these instincts flowed from my family’s history in the borderlands, and the Chicano civil rights movement, specifically.
But any leftist proclivities were quickly suppressed by Harvard academics, generally, and mainstream economists, in particular.
(This isn’t to say there weren’t great leftist professors and students on campus. There were. I became friends with many of them. I wish I had met more of them. I wish had worked alongside more of them.)
But by & large, I listened to the Big Names. When Mankiw told me my ideas were fantasies, I listened. I had my own BS and hang-ups. But I was also a teenager who didn’t know any better. I became, in the words of @nancyfraser, a “progressive neoliberal.” https://lpeblog.org/2018/01/25/the-crisis-of-progressive-neoliberalism/
I stuffed all my ideas for social justice into the box of orthodox economics. I took it for granted that this was just how things were done. I had been successfully reprogrammed.
I balked at some of the more extreme stuff, skipped odious lectures, etc., but even at my most transgressive points, I was living and breathing manufactured conventional wisdom.
And then Lehman fell. To my great shame, I could not explain what had happened to my friends and family back home. Because my teachers could not. They did not include money or banking in their models. They didn’t see the crash coming. What insights could they have offered?
I floundered. By virtue of further privilege, I was able to find new teachers. Most importantly, I was able to take a class at the law school, where Roberto Mangabeira Unger became the first person to truly walk me through the intellectual history of economics.
I learned that economists used to care about institutions, banking, & money. I learned many of the most creative thinkers had been pushed out of the elite academy. I discovered I hadn’t really been learning about those responsible for the New Deal or Great Society programs.
In a sentence, I realized I had been brainwashed. I was told one slice of the field was the whole world. I started reading more. Through working in Dem politics after graduation, I had a front row ticket to the multi-state mortgage fraud settlement, in live time. Occupy happened.
Every experience in the financial reform world, every experience in law school, and every professional experience since, has only proved to me, more and more, that the Big Names do not know -- or refuse to acknowledge -- what’s actually going down.
They were wrong about the GFC. They were wrong about austerity. They were wrong about the EU. The list goes on and on and on.
Today, I work to help low-income communities directly fight banks, debt collectors, and other financial villains. I also collaborate with a wide range of heterodox scholars and activists. (Many of them are #MMT. Many of them are not.)
In any case, I promise you what they’re saying is far closer to on-the-ground reality than anything I’ve ever learned from the Big Names, with rare exceptions. I know it’s scary to dismiss what the Big Names say. They have power and prestige.
But they are not scientists. They are not doctors. They are not objectively the best at what they do. Most of them are representatives of a failed elite consensus. They are afraid to admit their lens for looking at the world is fundamentally warped.
The Big Names simply could not and cannot explain the old world. They should not lead us into the future. Let them go. 
