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2021-10-11
For a much longer, much better version of some of what I say below, see this piece by anthropologist David Graeber.
Against Economics by David Graeber
Economics as a discipline has always been conditioned by one very important fact: It is not actually a _scientific_ discipline at all, and at some level, every economist knows it. This is why the "discipline" is populated more than any other by fundamentalists of one school or another, not by collaborators and interlocutors working toward some kind of verifiable knowledge, as in actual sciences. Fundamentalism is what always takes the place of materialism/realism when a) there is no actual scientific grounding to your ideology, and b) you have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that there is.
In fact, bankers bought their way into the Nobel Prize system, quite literally. In 1968, Sweden's central bank made a hefty "donation" to the Nobel Foundation. On top of that initial perpetually invested seed money, each year the bank pays another $1 million to the foundation just to keep information about the "economics" prize on the website. Pretty expensive advertising, if you ask me. They pay another million each year for "administrative expenses," but this is really a straight up bribe. Of course, the point of all this is to purchase the prestige and legitimation that the Nobel Prize name confers on a discipline — to purchase something whose value is determined not by the market, but by the collective belief of the group of people who know and care about the prize in the first place, which in this case is pretty much the whole world. Everybody believes that the Nobel system gives awards to really, really good scientists, and this is more or less true.
For the Swedish central bank to buy it's way into a prestigious award system is essentially the story of economics as such. Rich, powerful people have a vested interest in justifying their power and riches, so they pay a bunch of people to do the justifying and give them the name "economists. These lackeys then "study" an invented abstract entity called "the economy." They use scientific language, mathematical models (invariably based on politically motivated assumptions, but this can never be pointed out in polite company), peer review, and even real data to produce "knowledge" and "laws" about how this invented abstract "economy" works. "Economics," such as it is, takes the material world — which is actually an incredibly complicated set of social relationships, value assignments, political judgments, moral imperatives, and physical systems, all interaction in a thousand different ways — and forces it into a neat little box with just a few simple parameters that can always be fine-tuned by the researcher to produce whatever results they'd like to see confirmed.
And then they proceed to review each other's "work," award each other degrees, etc. Clearly I'm being reductive for the sake of a short little post on a backwater internet protocol, but the point is obvious enough.
This farce has been so incredibly successful that "mainstream economics" is pretty much the dominant ideological system for pretty much the entire world, even ordinary people. The religious parallels are obvious enough and need not be stated. It's a farce that everyone, everywhere, must treat as the overarching system outlining and guiding more or less every aspect of their lives. Acknowledging the fact that economics is fake is not likely to get you very far, except perhaps in a few academic circles and radical activist communities and their supporters.
It's all just such a nice little rhyme: The preeminent award for a fake discipline — parasitically using the methods and jargon of real sciences — is itself a fake award parasitically feeding on the prestige of real awards and real scientists, and both have to be sustained by constant injections of money from rich folks who need to justify their existence.
It should be noted, though, that none of this means that there aren't legitimate economic laws, facts, markets, models, etc.: There are all of these things, to be sure, and they are very important. And this isn't to say that there couldn't be a science that genuinely studies these things and seeks after the truth. It's just that "economics" as it is understood and practiced today _isn't it._ In fact, there was such a legitimate science for a long time, but it was killed in its infancy. Still, there are a lot of people who are trying to make it real again, to rebirth it. It even has a name: Political Economy. May it rise once more.