Comments on: Criticism of economics isn’t ‘dangerous’. But a stubborn monoculture is

By: BC

BC — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 18:29:00 +0000

Yes. Marginal utility is one of those text book elegancies which are so beloved of this school. When their theories are tested and failed in the real world neoliberal theorists tend to blame the real world. Witness in particular Allan Greenspan’s blustering about the financial community’s failure to act in its own interests after the 2008 crash. The theory about human behaviour was fine. It was the humans who were getting it wrong!

By: Mike Curtis

Mike Curtis — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 11:47:00 +0000

I take your point. The Mont Pelerin group was not, of course, just academic economists, but also politicians, bankers and the like. As you imply, it would be the politicians and bankers who would make the running, while the academics would be there to provide some supposedly rigorous theoretical foundation to the attempt to take over the world. Few academics would want to miss out, not only on funding but also recognition and the chance for their pet theories to become the new orthodoxy! As an economic theory, based pretty solidly on the marginal utility theory, neoliberalism could be said to have some academic validity. It is the actual practice where the full political context and the effects on human beings have to be taken into account, where it fails so disastrously.

By: BC

BC — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 20:32:00 +0000

“It is not fair to blame the economists themselves, who are all, presumably, human beings, when they are faced with the twin seductions of influence over the powerful and (a kind of) fame. ”

Hmm. I’m not so sure. If you trace the growth of neo-liberalism from the first meeting at Mont Pelerin through the Chicago School, Virginia Tech, UCLA and George Mason University you find a systematic political project which had the goal of replacing democratic accountability with market mechanisms and doing so in a manner which would be difficult or, better still, impossible to reverse. This is not a conspiracy theory. Nancy Maclean ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=democracy+in+chains&tag=mh0a9-21&index=aps&hvadid=8881055929&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_8eg151cm81_e ) happened upon a solid paper trail linking James Buchanan, Charles Koch and others in a relationship in which they referred to themselves as conspirators and, in the revealed correspondence, plainly stated their purposes amongst each other. So I think the author has missed out the point that Right Wing economists are largely dependant on contributions from oligarchs like Koch for funding and are therefore beholden to come up with analyses and forecasts which serve their purposes.

By: Mike Curtis

Mike Curtis — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 15:33:00 +0000

I would say that much of the “blame”, if we are in the business of assigning blame, has to lie at the door of (most) politicians and (virtually all of) the media. They hanker after certainty. They believe, perhaps rightly, that the public that they need to inform and whose support they need are not interested in the probabilities and uncertainties that are endemic to a soft science such as economics and that faced with the difficult mental exercise of trying to understand the intricacies they will turn to a soap opera or the sports pages. The emphasis on education and the additional skills needed to convey the full context are difficult. It is much simpler and more financially rewarding to concentrate on training instead of education and the simple cheapness of fake certainty.
It is not fair to blame the economists themselves, who are all, presumably, human beings, when they are faced with the twin seductions of influence over the powerful and (a kind of) fame. The politicians will always require tame experts to justify their policies, and the media will always want the unequivocal predictions that sell newspapers.
In the long run we need more educational emphasis on economics and statistics, along with maths, science and the rest to bring about an informed populace and a genuine democracy. We do not seem to be heading in that direction at any great speed despite the protestations of (guess who) the politicians. Other countries, China springs to mind, seem to doing a lot more, albeit starting from further back. In the meantime we must hope that that the independent, internet based, media continue their growth and we can at least provide more of a challenge to the orthodoxy. The next, inevitable, crash might shock the world into a revolutionary change in the way we run our economies, but I am not holding my breath.