A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Economics as master narrative

Did you know that economists can tell us how much we should care about future generations or how risk averse we ought to be? Yeah, me neither!

I’ve recently found myself increasingly irritated at the way economics (or, worse, a popularized version of it) has begun to function as a kind of master narrative among our pundit classes and the airport bookstore set. In fact, one of the things that prompted me to rethink my former mostly uncritical support for free trade was that I got sick of condescending economists telling me I shouldn’t care about things like whether the stuff I buy was made in a sweatshop, or whether my hometown is being hollowed out by de-industrialization.

This new style of economic punditry creates the illusion of promising value-free solutions to political conflicts. And it allows dissenters to be dismissed as economically illiterate troglodytes. I don’t generally buy into the more catastrophic critiques of political liberalism offered by thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, but I can’t help but wonder if this econo-mania is a way of filling the vacuum left when moral debate has been expunged from the public sphere.

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5 responses to “Economics as master narrative”

  1. gaius sempronius gracchus

    Economists as a group are professional cheerleaders for capitalism.

    The more hard core they are, the more openly they defend the “fuck your neighbor” ethic of the “rational egoism” the system relies on, legitimates, and even celebrates.

    But in another part of the madhouse another batch of apologists is doing what it can to deny or distract attention from the race to the bottom inherent to a system bent on doing its worst for profit, of which the famous iron law of wages is only one lovable feature.

    Popularizing the all-purpose authority of economists and the omni-competence of their discipline (I have seen philosophers write that the economic theory of rationality is the theory of rationality) is just part of the propaganda deluge in an oligarchy in which the political process and the mass media marginalize serious criticism.

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  2. gaius sempronius gracchus

    Hmmph. Fogot to change the URL that auto-fills.

    I hope this one is right.

    http://undemocracy.blogspot.com/

    Reply
  3. Camassia

    Actually, Landsburg isn’t saying that. Instead, he seems to be saying that your assumptions about how rmuch we should care about future generations or how risk-averse we should be have to be plugged into economic calculations about how much we should spend on fighting climate change.

    Having said that, though, his argument does seem to go in a circle. He lauds efforts to be more detached and rational about climate change, but says you also really need to “justify” your assumptions about things like risk aversion. How you do that, though, he doesn’t really explain.

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  4. Lee

    Camassia, you have a point, but he still writes as though determining the proper value of those assumptions is a task for economists, since it’s ultimately about “calculation.”

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  5. Dan

    The problem with popular neoclassical economics is the base assumption that people are rational beings with perfect knowledge that seek to maximize their personal utility. It tries to explain “uneconomic behavior” in economic lingo such as trade offs: you don’t work 24 hours a day because individuals value some leisure time more than the marginal hour of work. Basically we are super-intelligent robots consuming “utility”, because it is easier to predict/explain robots’ actions because they are supposedly rational decisions.

    But it also assumes that individuals understand all of the consequences of actions. So that one can use math to calculate risk aversion or how one values future generations.

    Neoclassical economics glosses over the fact that humans can make stupid decisions and do not necessarily calculate the future value of every consequence of their actions.

    There are other schools of thought in economics than neoclassical, but are not as accepted because they are not as quantitative.

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