Excerpt from the full article by Molly Scott-Cato @ The Ecologist, 17 August 2009
'Some of you may know that I live an exciting double life. When I am not writing for the Ecologist and playing the role of the radical critic of modern capitalism I am sitting demurely in an ivory tower masquerading as a university teacher. So far I have managed the tension fairly successfully, but my recent forays into curriculum development have unearthed what a trekkie might refer to as ‘an anomaly’.
For those of you who do not know university protocol I should tell you that each degree programme has an external examiner, who keeps the academics on their toes and protects the standard for students. Quite right too, I thought, until our external examiner recently questioned the content of a course I was teaching on Applied Economics, because of the absence of ‘formal models’. This resulted in some discussion with colleagues about exactly what a formal model is: we could not be certain but we shared a suspicion that it meant numbers and statistics.
You cannot teach economics without maths, apparently, although you can teach it without morality. And the converse also applies. Because if you are part of a discipline that cannot function without counting then it cannot properly value what cannot be measured. Moral considerations are, for this reason, excluded wholesale from economics as taught in our universities.'
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