Finally we Hermann Hesse’s full length novel, The Glass Bead Game, for which he won a Nobel Prize, describing a syllabus in mainstream economics. We cannot quote it in full, but instead let wikipedia do the talking:
The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date, centuries into the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book’s narrator writing around the start of the 25th century.[2] The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, reserved by po**litical decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum.
In other words, the econ courses are taught to people who will have little to no real world experience. Certainly they have not actually run a business. It was a political decision to isolate them from reality.
Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys, and to nurture and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as Waldzell.
The boarding school for underaged boys is a veiled reference to Keynes’s well known dark side. The econ majors have to be isolated not only from the outside world, but from the rest of the student body, lest they find out what real science looks like.
The rules of the game are only alluded to, and are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of …mathematics…Essentially the game…proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics.
Sound familiar?
One day Joseph Knecht, the smartest guy they have, wakes up and gets it:
As the novel progresses, Knecht begins to question his loyalty to the order; he gradually comes to doubt that the intellectually gifted have a right to withdraw from life’s big problems.
As Mises said, economics is all about predicting the future and knowing what to do about it. All the mainstream econ courses Knecht took either don’t bother with that stuff [econometrics], or get it completely wrong [macro].
Knecht comes to see Castalia as a kind of ivory tower, an ethereal protected community, devoted to pure intellectual pursuits but oblivious to the problems posed by life outside its borders.
Econometrics to a T.
Knecht wakes up, dumps the whole thing, starts spreading the truth:
Knecht does the unthinkable: he resigns as Magister Ludi [top dog] and asks to leave the order, ostensibly to become of value and service to the larger culture. The heads of the order deny his request to leave, but Knecht departs Castalia anyway, initially taking a job as a tutor to his childhood friend Designori’s energetic and strong-willed son, Neodoxy.
But the CIA was onto him:
Only a few days later, the story ends abruptly with Knecht drowning in a mountain lake…
Next post, how to save yourself from this tragic death.