Is economics responsible for the moral turpitude of MBAs? - THE Economist

The case:

In an extraordinary mea culpa, Sumantra Ghoshal, a respected business academic who died last year, argued in a paper to be published shortly that the way MBA students are taught has freed them “from any sense of moral responsibility” for what they subsequently do in their business lives. This, he believed (and other respected academics, such as Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford, are carrying his argument forward), is because management studies have been hi-jacked intellectually by the dismal science of economics.

The Economist's rejoinder, and I quote,

Mr Ghoshal and his supporters are right that top business schools strive for academic respectability, and that this has led them to rely heavily on economic theory. But they are wrong to criticise this. As long as schools are teaching academic degrees (and, after all, the letters MBA stand for Master of Business Administration), they have to teach the most compelling business theories around. It may be a pity that these are mostly to be found in economics. But that is the fault of other disciplines for not coming up with ideas to rival, for example, agency theory or the maximisation of shareholder value.

The real problem arises when students, or their new employers, believe that an MBA is, somehow, a qualification for business leadership.

My take: I join this opinion. Criticisms of economics on these grounds reveals the critic's fundamental ignorance about what economics is. (via Newmark's Door)

UPDATE: More at Ignorati who points us here where we find, and I quote,

Keynes was right when he observed that economic ideas are more powerful than is commonly understood,[v] and many economists are rather proud of this ideological power. Their positive quest to understand and control the social process of the market is unavoidably normative in its capacity to shape the consciousness and culture of market societies. Moreover, their academic indoctrination of new students, particularly those disciples of applied economics, the self-assured and unreflective MBAs, represents a normative intervention whose impact on society can hardly be overstated.

Keynes was right. But if you are looking for dangerous economic ideas, look not at the ascendancy of the Chicago School economic ideas taken up by Thatcher and Reagan, but at the utopian ideas they displaced, such as Keynes'. (For more, go to The Commanding Heights.)