Alienation Nation
And another thing …
It occurs to me that one reason the western world is awash with right wing populist politics at the moment is the total alienation of the average voter from the techno-bureaucracy that runs our economies. After all that technical mumbo-jumbo hasn’t done much to improve things, and has, arguably, made things a whole lot worse for the average voter.
Our economies are run by experts whose knowledge is rooted deeply in near mystical beliefs about imaginary objects like equilibrium rather than in real things. They are so committed to this magic that they impugn anything else. The real world is treated with a snobbish contempt. It is looked down upon as being riven through with all sorts of errors and failures. The sort of errors and failures that the pristine world of economics treats as taboo. Or at least as anomalies to be eradicated forthwith.
The disconnect between the educated class and the rest of society is enormous. All that technical know-how represents a barrier to empathy. It prevents the technocrats from feeling anything about the world that they presume to both study and then manage. It dehumanizes them. It is as if they live elsewhere.
This reminds of the way in which the early economists, people like Malthus spring to mind, talked about regular people. Their contempt was scarcely veiled. Indeed the entire Malthusian project was based upon an extraordinarily dim and hopelessly snobbish view of humankind. Workers we treated, analytically, as hardly one rung up from common animals.
Fast forward to Economists like Milton Freidman and his libertarian project. He felt more at home describing the demand of ‘units’ rather than that of ‘people’. Presumably this allowed him to ignore the incredible lack of empathy in his supposedly human centric ideas. No one truly interested in actual human behavior opens a chapter with these words: “Let us consider first the behavior of a consumer unit under conditions of complete certainty”, which is the way in which Friedman opens chapter two of his work “A Theory Of The Consumption Function”. It is technocratic speak. It is bureaucratic. It is divorced from the essence of its subject which is the study of an aspect of exchange between humans.
No wonder it seems hard for those steeped in technical theories to appreciate their relationship with regular families. Or to understand the enormous impact that those theories have.
And no wonder that voters respond with an enormous collective rejection of the dehumanizing nature of the conversation about our major issues. It is easy to stir up extreme politics when the alternative offered by the technocrats is so sterile, bereft of humanity, and entirely couched in gobbledegook designed to aggrandize academic reputations rather than explain anything.
After all it isn’t as if that gobbledegook has worked well for the average person, is it?
