Just the background Jeffery Sachs ('shock therapy'), Robert Rubin (Wall Street) and Stanley Fischer (IMF) types have really given the economists everywhere a bad name...with their insistence of inflation busting (to protect the creditors) and causing downturns and slow recoveries, as well as insisting on rapid capital market liberalisation that ruined East Asia (in spite of their high saving rate), Argentina and Russia in the recent past. A recent trip to Indonesia made me realise how drastically their currency has been devalued - USD 1 = 1,000000 Indonesian Rupiah)..and their economy is still to recover to the pre-crisis level. The US Treasury and even the World Bank (which is slowly changing its ways) are party to this. All these have mostly benefitted special interests -Wall Street, and cartels (Steel industry and Alcoa) in US and also the financial insitutions and pampered farmers in Europe. Switzerland spends about USD 5-7 per cow per day - and each cow has bigger files than even the PM of Nepal. Why cows live under USD 5-7 dollars per day while the billions live under USD 1 per day is what the world has come to. The US's foreign policy is dictated by corporate interests... and aligned with the Right wing and the neo-cons. WTO resides in pointlessness, with the US and EU coopting India and Brazil thus weakening the position of the South last July in Geneva, accomplishing in 24 hours what could not be accomplished in 7-8 years. Divide and rule. Coopt. US and EU subsidies are protected under Blue and Green boxes...while NAMA has been a victory for MNCs. While economists in general have failed to speak out for the developing world ('because they know which side their bread is buttered') or have mostly promoted market fundamentalism - which is a blind ideology- and have rarely taken into account the distributional effects of their policies, their blind adherence to textbook economics, without exploring alternatives has really been sad. The US sociologists are now making a comeback to challenge the intellectual stranghold of economists. Let's hope that the sociologists with their grassroots feel - and with their new found purpose - will have a salubrious effect on the way economic policies are made. I, for one, feel economists have so much to learn from anthropologists and sociologists. Time to stop the hegemony of the Western economists with their "The one size fits all' prescriptions which are foisted on the developing world, without regard to peculiar socio-economic and cultural contexts of the latter. ---------------------- For more, please see: Four days in California US sociologists are finally challenging the intellectual stranglehold of economists http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,9830,1289616,00.html