'All for ourselves and nothing for other people': The takeov

'All for ourselves and nothing for other people': The takeov

Postby Oscar » Fri Dec 16, 2016 11:03 am

'All for ourselves and nothing for other people': The takeover of economics by neoliberalism

[ http://rabble.ca/columnists/2016/12/all ... liberalism ]

By Murray Dobbin | December 16, 2016

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. -- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

In these days of economic stagnation, misery and insecurity, housing bubbles and the growing precariate, it seems appropriate to speculate on what Shakespeare might have written today [ https://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quot ... ll-lawyers ] were he penning a modern rewrite of Henry VI. In declaring, "first let's kill all the lawyers," his character was voicing support for Jack Cade, whose revolutionary vision cast lawyers as paper-shuffling parasites ruining the lives of the common people. In the past 25 years that ignoble role has been usurped by economists. I liked them better when economics was called the dismal science -- now the profession is simply a self-satisfied apologia for the plunder of society's wealth by the greedy and ruthless 1% -- the "masters of mankind."

Priests of neoliberalism

Economics is no longer a science, if it ever was. It is a religion whose priests bend every effort to make the dogma of neoliberalism impervious to its disastrous outcomes. If it were a science the facts would long ago have prevailed and they would have denounced the ideology from the rooftops.

But, no, instead we get articles on a weekly basis about Canadians' staggering debt load and the only attempt at explanation is so-called "human nature" -- i.e. "Gee, people just don't seem to be worrying -- they're ignoring the warnings." Then there's the ingenious concept of "recency bias" developed by someone in the field of "behavioural finance" (who knew?). Recency bias means, according to the Globe's Rob Carrick, "People are looking at recent events and projecting them into the future indefinitely." [ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-in ... e31898885/ ]

That's it? That's the best the economics profession can come up with to explain Canadians' indebtedness catastrophe? It's all about human behaviour, written in stone, so I guess we might as well just sit back and observe the meltdown in the comfort of our economist's middle-class lifestyle.

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[ http://rabble.ca/columnists/2016/12/all ... liberalism ]
Oscar
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