A Reminder on Democracy

I am cleaning up my files. The Gilens and Page article on democracy in the US is in the pile. This is a reminder of their conclusion:

“Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

Ah. But as a wise person said just this week: “equality is irrelevant if poor people are getting richer”.

That we lose our democracy along the way is of no importance. After all losing democracy is a subject for study by political scientists, and we all know that politics has absolutely nothing to do with economics. Don’t we?

No we don’t.

Only a naive fool can theorize about economics and pretend that the political and social ramifications of their theories have no importance or that those ramifications have no impact on their theories.

It’s time for economists to crawl out of the weeds, take a deep breath, and get back to doing political economy.

There were wise heads back then too, when economics was called political economy. And they called it that for a reason. A damn compelling reason.

Because that’s what we have: a political economy