Liberation Day

Let’s have fun:

There are probably plenty of people out there who are intimidated by the constant jargon and obscurity of economists. After all economics is well known to be laden with mathematics, counter intuitive insights, and all manner of models — large and small — to cover situations that most of us have never thought of let alone tried to contemplate. Put a couple of economists in a room and they will come up with several clever  alternative solutions to any problem. They will churn out homilies on incentives. They will chatter on about equilibrium. They will laud market forces. They will sternly criticize the government. They will prattle on about efficiency. They will talk darkly of the futility of intervention in the motions of markets. They will wax lyrical about the benefits of competition. They will smile knowingly when asked about rational expectations, the primacy of individual choice, or the ironclad laws of marginal analysis.  And they will be particularly chuffed if you pay homage to the rigor of their technique, because for them mathematical exegesis has replaced the spoken word as the preferred language of their art.

All this is designed to make mere mortals like you and I quake in our boots and defer to their superiority. They alone, we are led to believe, have sufficient skills to steer the economy to the promised land. Wherever and whatever that is.

But fear not!

For, as it turns out, a cursory dip into their world reveals that it is empty. Entirely so. It is a land of make believe. A world of fantasy where up is down and down is up. A world constructed specifically to produce certain answers and to condemn others. A world where applied mathematics is the currency of oppression of fact. Where evidence matters less than clever modeling. And where having experience of an actual economy is irrelevant to building a reputation as a sage of economics.

Economics doesn’t exist. It is a swirl of formalized opinion. It is an ideological or faith based attempt to impose a certain point of view onto society. Indeed in its more zealous moments it denies the existence of society because its relentless focus is on the individual. Quite how it can consequently speak of the collective we know as a market we are not suppose to ask: for the collective marketplace is the one exception to the rule in economics that groups do not exist.

We are not supposed to notice the absurdity of rational expectations, of micro foundations, or of all the paraphernalia needed to keep the rickety neoliberal project aloft, or of the total disdain of democracy that sits at the heart of the discipline. And, especially, we are supposed to ignore all the work done through the decades that undermines the relevance of economics as a practical art. Instead we are supposed to admire its celestial beauty, its mathematical coherence, and its self-aggrandizing self-absorbed self-supporting self-congratulatory self.

For there is no other way. There is no other way to engage with economics other than to be absorbed by its selfish ways. The moment you realize that all is not well, however small your doubt, or however small the detail you are questioning, the entire edifice crumbles. So there can be no doubt. None.

Since nothing can rise to that utopian perfection you ought fear not: economics does not exist. It cannot. It is a sham.

Repeat after me: economics does not exist. You are not a fool for not understanding it. Indeed that lack of understanding makes you a thinking human being and not the kind of automaton economists need you to be in order for their theories to work.

But let me stop. You have read all this before. And it makes no difference. Economists continue to infect the world with their false doctrines and presume to be able to ruin lives on their basis. They continue to defy the real world, to ignore evidence, to subvert democracy, to deny the idiocy of their prior conditions or their assumptions, and to revel in the irrelevance of their most cherished ideas.

All you need to know is the paradox of economics, which is as follows:

At the heart of their program ignorer  to drain the world of choice, diversity, uncertainty, and all those other attributes of reality they so abhor sits the assumption that you and I calculate, connive, and decide in complete concordance with the mathematics of economics. That is to say that you and I are, in fact, economists in action and thought. We act according to the rules of economics. We know those rules intimately. We live by them. So completely are we governed by these rules that we cannot distinguish between them and any other impulse we might have. For there is no other impulse.

So we all could slide into any conversation about economics, no matter how obscure the topic, and participate naturally and completely. There would be nothing that an economist could teach us. Our knowledge is total and all-encompassing.

That is the assumption needed to make their models work. That is the reality they postulate. That is the measure of their relevancy.

It reveals you and I as masters of economics. Even though we might claim to be ignorant of economics.

So fear not. You already know economics. You know it as well as any Nobel prize winner  or tenured professor. They cannot challenge you as being ignorant or unaware, because they have defined you as informed and knowledgeable. You could say anything and they would have to accept it or contradict themselves.

You are hereby liberated from any fears that you do not understand economics. You know it just as well as they do. If not better. After all you actually live in the real economy. They can only imagine what that’s like.

Ain’t liberation grand?