BICKLEIGH CASTLEA constant theme in economic thought has been that of equilibrium. But, the search for equilibrium was always elusive. Even Karl Marx in his Das Kapital was under the illusion that an economic system would at some time reach an equilibrium. Others knew better, and it was Joseph Schumpeter, a Harvard professor and economic historian, who was studying business cycles, concluded that the capitalist economic system, and for that matter any economic system did not linger in an equilibrium. He even felt that there was no dynamic equilibrium, and pointed to new commodities as the reason. Economies are constantly subject to innovation he wrote.
The most famous macro economist of all time John Maynard Keynes also concluded that economies rarely reached an equilibrium. This did not stop classical and neoclassical economists from assuming equilibrium in their models. What resulted was the great schism between those that assumed economies would attain equilibrium and those who in face of severe criticism maintained that economics were constantly adjusting and generally were to be found in a state of moving disequilibrium, albeit dynamic.
What amazes one after reading all this history of thought is that the economists who proposed equilibrium did not seem very sophisticated at political science, and after all the field had been named political economy. The reason is obvious. For if you shared one view of politics and wanted to maintain the status quo, whether you were communist, liberal, or conservative, you would want to view the economic world as being in equilibrium.
That you were totally wrong did not matter. You wished to believe in the myth of economic equilibrium. So entrenched were the ideas of the equilibrium people that they would stop students from getting post graduate degrees if they viewed the economic world as in disequilibrium. The left wingers and the right wingers would select leaders and they would agree amongst themselves to maintain an equilibrium of graduates who exposed there respective views of the economy and indirectly political philosophy.
Thus in return for two PhD graduates of equilibrium there would be in return two PhD graduates of disequilibrium. So the result was a state of equilibrium, you might think. But no! The problem was that no matter how much you avoided reality by allowing only mathematical models of equilibrium to pass a PhD, you would end up in disequilibrium because more students wanted to show that economies were in disequilibrium. So to solve the problem, PhD graduates proposing dissertations that exceeded the number of those producing theses of equilibrium were stopped from getting PhDs by being failed, or discouraged, or told to do more work so that they waited five years or more in a queue before attaining their PhDs. Such was the state of disequilibrium at the best British universities in the world when I was a post graduate student.
What is it like now?