Confessions of a Recovering Economist

From ZNet:

Economists believe the 'value' of something is its monetary price. How, then, do we understand the truly powerful passions and desires and emotions that dominate our lives? Think of how most of us felt during the SARS scare.

Ask Canadians at that point which was more important - tax cuts or public health - and the choice would have been overwhelming. Ask someone who's just lost a loved one to place a dollar value on their feelings, and you'll probably get socked in the face. For the things that really determine our ability to lead a good life - family, health, community, peace - there are no price tags. Yet the business pages and the classifieds and the Sears catalogues are full of them.

And

Mainstream economics is arrogantly ahistorical. In most cases, capitalism is presented as a natural, eternal state of human affairs. Even the term 'capitalism' is rarely used: naming the system, after all, might imply that there are others. The preferred euphemism is 'market economy,' which implies that the economy is like some big flea market where anybody can set up a card table on Saturday mornings and sell their wares. It's just coincidence that General Electric has $575 billion (U.S.) worth of capital assets sitting on its card table, while you and I have only our brains and our brawn to offer.

Modern economics was not actually invented until the early days of capitalism. So the very discipline is historically relative - not to mention the economies it purports to study. And the roots of neoclassical economics were always inherently ideological: to justify, in the guise of explaining, the perverse distribution of power and wealth that emerged under this new social order. Studying economic history, and the history of economics, is the best way to critique this knee-jerk determinism, and to place the whole profession in a healthier, more contingent context. In economics, history itself is subversive.

For more, click here.

Economics, while useful in many ways, ultimately constitutes a dangerous philosophy due to the absurd amount of reverence the pseudo-science is paid by schools, politicians, and the news media. Rife with unfounded assumptions, plagued by a herd mentality, and wildly materialistic, economics is the priest caste of America's true religion, Mammonism.

For more of my views on economics, click here.

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