Challenging the Market: The ideological straitjacket of economics

Sunday, October 3, 2010

The ideological straitjacket of economics

"We need to develop a new way of conceiving the economic process. In calling for an end to economics, I am not suggesting that we should dismiss everything that economists have learned about the economy. Some economic insights are useful. Our goal should be to build up an understanding of the economy in a context that transcends the narrow context of economic theory that characterizes modern economic theory. In doing so, we may lay the groundwork for an economy that transcends our outmoded capitalist way of life."
Michael Perelman Railroading Economics

Stephen Marglin calls it the "dismal science". Michael Perelman writes about the ideological straitjacket of modern economics. James Galbraith describes contemporary economics in terms of a god that failed, a governing creed whose fallacies have been exposed by events of recent years. In his book Economia Australian Geoff Davies writes that we have all become so accustomed to the current economic regime that we fail to see how absurd it is. He is right.

I am currently reading the books pictured and all present a radical and sustained critique of contemporary economics. They challenge the idea that market and market forces are a solution to our social, environmental and economic problems.

These books don't just expose discredited contemporary economic orthodoxies, they also document the destructive effects of those orthodoxies in the real world (rather than the theories of economists and business leaders). These authors more importantly set an alternative and radical economic agenda for the future.

The books pictured include:

Stephen Margeli (2008) The Dismal Science

Michael Perelman (2006) Railroading Economics

James Galbraith (2008) The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and why Liberals Should to

Geoff Davies (2004) Economia: New Economic systems to empower people and support the living world

James Gustav Speth (2008) The Bridge at the End of the World

Barry Lynn (2009) Cornered:The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Dynamics of Destruction

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Quotes and Reflections

"The power of the dominant order is not just economic but intellectual-lying in the realm of beliefs"
Pierre Bourdieu

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose".
Tony Judt

"No lasting change has been successful without large numbers of people acting consciously and collectively around human values of solidarity and social justice, not market values. Markets are great ways to do some things, but not to fashion communities of caring and compassion"
Michael Edwards

"The markets have ruled for a third of a century but it has all ended in tears... Any great failure should force us to rethink. The present economic crises is a great failure of the market system"
Robert Skidelsky

"To concede the authority of the market is to affirm the legitimacy of the hierarchies that markets produce..... The market system is not open to fundamental reform; power relations cannot be changed"
James K Galbraith The Predator State

"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.": Howard Zinn, Historian and Author

"The dazzle of free markets has blinded us to other ways of seeing the world"
Raj Patel

"Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma. The G8's dogma is that the making of profit has to be mankind's guiding principle before which everything else from the traditional past or aspiring future must be sacrificed as illusion"
John Berger

" The capacity of the state for effective political action has been severely limited. As a result, quite a few of the modern-orthodox state functions have escaped or been shifted sideways to the markets, increasingly emancipated from political supervision (let alone direction) or have fallen or been dropped to the area of individually conducted "life politics"- by definition the sacrosanct realm of privacy"
Zygmunt Bauman

"The age of neo-liberalism is still with us despite everything.... no major figure of the neo-liberal cause, anywhere in the world, has recanted or acknowledged the disastrous consequences of their failed revolution.
The citadels of power, status and wealth across the globe still hum to the dynamics, logics and cliches of neo-liberalism despite the devastation they have wrought both recently, and across the whole of the last thirty years".
Gerry Hassan

Challenging the Market

Sunday, October 3, 2010

The ideological straitjacket of economics

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