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Harper's Magazine's Jeff Madrick pans 40 years of "dubious" economic policies originating at Harvard and reviews the history of "alternative economics," starting with SFI Professor Sam Bowles's move from Harvard to UMass Amherst in 1972.

"In the forty years since Bowles’s tenure was denied, Harvard’s economics department has become increasingly committed to a narrow, conservative agenda, thereby lending the university’s imprimatur to economic ideologies that have done terrible damage around the world," Madrick writes, then goes on to assess several U.S. economic policy decisions he says were motivated by thinking coming out of Harvard.

Bowles "eventually left Harvard for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he helped to develop perhaps the best department of alternative economics in the nation," Madrick writes.

Read the article in Harper's Magazine (September 2013, subscription required for full article)