New Year’s Resolutions

Well, that didn’t last long. I promised myself I would not waste any time this year on complaining about mainstream economics. There is no value in expending precious energy on something as stupid and ridiculous. It is cartoonish, silly, utterly worthless, irrelevant, and socially destructive. It is also demonically anti-democratic. Which upsets me above all.

As I said, that didn’t last long.

So here’s a question:

Is the mainstream/neoclassical/Chicago School, whatever you want to call it, making claims about reality? Or is it making claims about what reality ought to be?

Does this matter?

I leave it to you. But if the claims are that it represents reality, albeit in abstracted form, then that reality is not one you or I recognize. Perhaps it is a reality in some other part of the universe. Maybe Chicago? The claim is certainly false. Which reduces the entire enterprise to a giant, convoluted, and mathematically obscure sham.

Then again, if the claim is that it is about what reality ought to be, then it is a purely political activity to be set alongside other attempts to organize society, and is certainly not about actual economies as we now know them to be. This latter option is perfectly valid as a pursuit, just not as economics.

Unless, of course, you think that economics is irretrievably ideological anyway.

As you can see neither option is particularly attractive. They both point to something less than scientific. Not that I am going to talk about it at all.

Actually, it has always struck me as odd that economists of the fable-based ilk are terribly confused. They want to argue that people economic agents are spectacular calculating machines, rational, and capable of rendering decisions of great self-interested clarity when it comes to economic exchange. Yet these same people become political duffers and are easily duped into supporting horrendously inefficient and counter productive economic policies at the ballot box.

Which is it I wonder?

Are we rational actors? Or are we hopeless dupes?

Perhaps this confusion could be cleared up if we all studied a coherent social science instead of the self-referential fragments we call economics, sociology, political thought etc.

Then again maybe their economics is a simultaneous claim about reality and about what it ought to be. Both at once. People are rational, or not. And they are not, but ought to be. Something like that.

As a matter of fact I think that if anyone can actually believe in that kind of economics, their very existence is a negation of their own beliefs.

Doh! I wasn’t going to worry about any of this in 2016.