Neoclassical Economics Is Based on Myth

Washington's Blog

June, 30th, 2012

Neoclassical economics is a cult which ignores reality in favor of shared myths.

Economics professor Michael Hudson writes:

[One Nobel prize winning economist stated,]  “In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions.”

This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live….

Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize:

“Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them… The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world.  A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor the conclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made.”

Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences.

“Our models show there is no chance of water”

Neoclassical economists created the mega-banks, thinking that bigger was better.  They pretend that it’s better to help the big banks than the people, debt doesn’t exist, high levels of leverage are good, artificially low interest rates are fine, bubbles are great, fraud ....

Indeed, even after a brief period of questioning their myths – after the 2008 economic crisis proved their core assumptions wrong – they have quickly regressed into their old ways.

Economics professor Steve Keen notes:

Neoclassical economics has become a religion.  Because it has a mathematical veneer, and I emphasize the word veneer, they actually believe it’s true. Once you believe something is true, you’re locked into its way of thinking unless there’s something that can break in from the outside and destroy that confidence.

Paul Heyne said:

The arguments of economists legitimate social and economic arrangements by providing these arrangements with quasi-religious justification. Economists are thus doing theology while for the most part unaware of that fact.

Economics professor Bill Black told me:

The amount of fraud that drove the Wall Street bubble and its collapse and caused the Great Depression is contested [keep reading to see what Black means]. The Pecora investigation found widespread manipulation of earnings, conflicts of interest, and insider abuse by the nation’s most elite financial leaders. John Kenneth Galbraith’s work documented these abuses. Theoclassical economic accounts, however, ignore or excuse these abuses.

Black explains:

[Neoclassical economists believed that] fraud is impossible because securities markets are “efficient” and act as if they were guided by an “invisible hand.” Markets cannot be efficient if there is accounting control fraud, so we know (on the basis of circular reasoning) that securities fraud cannot exist. Indeed, when [mainstream economists] try to explain why the securities markets automatically exclude frauds their faith-based logic becomes even more humorous.

Alex Andrews notes in the Guardian:

Greenspan’s confession [that his assumption that fraud is not a big problem for the economy was totally wrong] was seen by many for precisely what it was: a crisis of faith, the faith that unrestricted free markets would always act benevolently. [Note: As we show below, neoclassical economists do not really believe in free markets.  As such, they are blind cultists, rather than thinking people of faith.] It revealed what a few had been arguing for some time, that the character of neoliberal economics is essentially religious. This is counter-intuitive. Surely the policy of Greenspan and others is based on an understanding of the science of economics, particularly in the mainstream neoclassical form that is most often taught in universities around the world? It is certainly the case that neoclassical economics appears scientific. This is because it deploys huge quantities of complex mathematics, giving it the veneer of being what it has long hoped to be, a kind of social physics.

***

Equations prove free markets work, but only in a sterile world of mathematical abstraction that relies on ridiculous assumptions such as perfectly competitive markets. It is little surprise then that Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, writing in the journal Nature, calls for a “scientific revolution” in economics.

Once economics loses its status as science, its religious aspects become more obvious. Robert H Nelson has spent his career trying to show that economics is religious in character. Through “the gospel of efficiency” after the second world war, Nelson argues that economists promised progress, a removal of sin, heaven on earth. Economists play the role of priests, defining good and bad behaviours that make this salvation possible.

***

It is clear that this is a market theodicy, justifying the ways of the market to men. When neoliberal politicians warn against governments interfering in the market, lest the irrational and temporary will of the electorate interfere with the “spontaneous order” of markets, this now seems like a dire warning that we must not “play God” and attempt to control the mysteries of the market that in our finitude, our “bounded rationality”, we cannot properly fathom.

Harpers noted in 2005 that neoclassical economics – underneath it’s veneer of math and science – is actually a twisted form of Protestant religion in disguise:

Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our contemporary culture. More than religion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural pattern of existence: the market. This understanding of markets—not as artifacts of human civilization but as phenomena of nature—now serves as the unquestioned foundation of nearly all political and social debate.

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Economics departments around the world are overwhelmingly populated by economists of one particular stripe. Within the field they are called “neoclassical” economists, and their approach to the discipline was developed over the course of the nineteenth century.

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Neoclassical economics tends to downplay the importance of human institutions, seeing instead a system of flows and exchanges that are governed by an inherent equilibrium. Predicated on the belief that markets operate in a scientifically knowable fashion, it sees them as self-regulating mathematical miracles, as delicate ecosystems best left alone.

If there is a whiff of creationism around this idea, it is no accident. By the time the term “economics” first emerged, in the 1870s, it was evangelical Christianity that had done the most to spur the field on toward its present scientific self-certainty.

When evangelical Christianity first grew into a powerful movement, between 1800 and 1850, studies of wealth and trade were called “political economy.” The two books at the center of this new learning were Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817).

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Ricardo concluded that the interests of different groups within an economy—owners, investors, renters, laborers—would always be in conflict with one another. Ricardo’s credibility with the capitalists was unquestionable: he was not a philosopher like Adam Smith but a successful stockbroker who had retired young on his earnings. But his view of capitalism made it seem that a harmonious society was a thing of the past: class conflict was part of the modern world, and the gentle old England of squire and farmer was over.

The group that bridled most against these pessimistic elements of Smith and Ricardo was the evangelicals. These were middle-class reformers who wanted to reshape Protestant doctrine. For them it was unthinkable that capitalism led to class conflict, for that would mean that God had created a world at war with itself. The evangelicals believed in a providential God, one who built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God’s plan. The free market, they believed, was a perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behavior and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant.

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