economics education

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

I recently saw the film "Y Tu Mama Tambien." This film is about the
sexual and other adventures of two Mexican youth, one from the upper
crust and one from the professional middle class. Ignoring the (very
interesting) sexual dimension, it reminded me of a Chilean graduate
student I knew at UC-Berkeley. Like him, the two youth spent a lot of
time smoking dope. Unlike in the U.S. at the time (the mid-1970s), in
Chile marijuana was the drug of choice for only the upper classes. (Even
though pot was effectively free for the taking in Chile at the time!)
This seemed to be true in the movie, too. 

The other opiate was economics education. The rich kid in the movie was
being pressed to major in economics (and to abandon literature) by his
parents, while my friend was of course studying economics. At the end of
the movie, the rich kid was chastened and had decided to embrace
economics. (Sorry to give the ending away!)  It seems that in much or
most of what used be called the "third world," economics is the field of
choice of ambitious members of the richer classes. Further, it seems
that a lot of the prime ministers -- most recently in India -- are
trained in economics (and thus dubbed "technocrats"). 

The kind of economics most embraced is the Washington Consensus, the
neo-liberalism of the IMF, World Bank, and the US Treasury. The third
world sends its richer kids to study this economics in the economics
equivalent of the "School of the Americas" (the University of Chicago,
MIT, etc.) and then the first world sends them back to institute
structural adjustment, free trade and capital flows, austerity, and
privatization. It's reminiscent of the way in which the "wogs"
(colonized populations) used to send their best & brightest to England
to learn how to help the Brits run the colonies.

Jim Devine