Against Economics
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Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.

Paywalled New York Review of Books link

Ostensibly a review of “Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics” by Robert Skidelsky, Occupy Wallstreet economist David Graeber uses the New York Review of Books as a platform to toss intellectual bombs at the foundations of the academic field of economics.

Graeber exposes orthodox economics as an expression of academic politics and institutional power, rather than a sincere practice of science. He dynamites foundational principles like the quantity theory of money, the efficient market hypothesis, and the concept of economic microfoundations themselves.

Perhaps dismal but not science, economics is an ecclesiastical field of infrapolitical struggle, one in which the clergy of its orthodoxy must be toppled to allow science to return and society thrive.

  • @fwandyEnglish
    2•8 months ago

    What a great, dense and brief opinion piece. I miss Graeber