i did this interdisciplinary thing for my B.S. between that and AP shit in high school and some macro i took during my initial false start at college, i took a solid amount of econ classes, including upper division stuff.
the only value i got as a human trying to live and work in this world, besides understanding what the machine wants us to believe, is the coursework i did on managerial principles/accounting and some non-profit managerial economics, which the instructor made sure to instill in us that non-profits (outside of very specific cases) could not be managed like for profit organizations, that it was a very different skillset and required a deeper understanding of concepts that do not conform to the economic model (public goods, altruism, etc). it was super interesting and absolutely gave me a leg up in understanding how non profits work/fail/exploit or occasionally reform out of dysfunction and succeed. and i can push back hard when douchebags try to cowboy some cash strapped org by saying “this needs to be run like a business”, because no. this is america, jack, if it could be a business, it would be a business.
Econ is one of the worst academic subjects and as social of a social science you can get. Sure all the math equations make sense to them they made them up. Congrats on having your rules you make up follow logically together. You’re like a fantasy writer now. Just change the rules you fking knobs this ain’t physics.
I mostly agree, the problem is the math and theory used in econ PhD programs is fairly complex so when you try and argue this point the economists just say “well you just say that because you don’t understand all the math that goes into it”.
What I would love is for Marxists with some real high-level knowledge of mathematics (I’m pretty sure we even have some comrades here like that) to dissect a PhD level econ theory textbook and criticise it.
I mean, the problem isn’t the mathematics itself–it’s not like they’re making mistakes in solving equations or something like that–but the foundational assumptions behind the mathematical models. Virtually all economists will admit, when pressed, that their models only describe highly idealized systems that resemble the real world only if you take on board a set of very suspect assumptions that we actually have good reason to think are false (or at least true only in extremely limited edge cases). This wouldn’t be useless exactly–in the same way that equations about the behavior of frictionless physical systems aren’t useless–if it weren’t for the fact that most of the time, most economists seem to conveniently forget about those simplifying assumptions and recommend policy as if their models are isomorphic to real world systems in all the relevant ways. There’s a kind of pervasive amnesia in the discipline about the relationship between the map and the territory, and they end up making pronouncements (and, worse, policy recommendations) based on models that they know are deficient in pretty serious ways.
There’s another pretty serious foundational problem involving value theory and system individuation concerns–the way the models are structured reflects some fairly hefty evaluative choices about what’s important, what sorts of states should be thought of as relevantly different from one another, and so on–that’s wrapped up with this one, but it’s in the same family of concerns. At bottom, the big problem with the field is that they reify their own models in super suspect ways, and don’t always seem cognizant of the difference between “here’s a set of simplifying assumptions to make this problem tractable; we can learn some things from looking at this idealization, but have to remember it is different from the real world in significant ways” and “this is a good model that actually reflects the world.”
I enjoyed econ and I see no reason to argue with it but like the problem is, ok they have the chapter on market failures. Like what if market failures are HUGE in scale? You know there’s the one chapter and then they move “ok but the rest of this is true…”. What if market failures are MOST of the story? The textbook should be 95% market failure and 5% equilibrium stuff.
This is why Marx’s Capital is far and away the best explanation of capitalism that’s ever been written. I genuinely think even people who are pro-capitalism should read it if they really want to understand how capitalism works.
Bourgeois economics has no interest in scratching beneath the surface of things. To them, capitalism is the status quo and many of them think it’s simply the way the world works and has always worked. I have yet to see a bourgeois economist ever concern themselves with understanding, for example, really why market failures actually exist or how pervasive they are.
why market failures actually exist
It tends to be pinned onto a very specific group of people or on outside situations that “can’t be controlled”. Funny enough, they NEVER successfully predict this stuff happening, and the “rebuilding” they do is usually the worst case scenario
Michael Hudson makes the point that’s it not even just capitalism that economics departments don’t question anymore, but also specifically neoliberal economics. All the old timers like Adam smith, Ricardo, etc we’re concerned about keeping markets free from domination by rentier interests so that they’d be more productive. But they apparently got around that by just scrapping any study of the history of economic thought in Econ departments altogether. The term “Free market” has essentially been retconned to mean free FOR rentier exploitation, rather than free FROM it.