For the record, then, no I didn’t misread what you wrote. You brought me into it as part of your overall personal attack to which you ended up resorting (as in your third paragraph in your last response).
Thus, you said earlier, “You seem to think that gaining utility from selfless acts reduces it to selfishness. Whatever, Ben,” and ‘Suppose we see someone on the street being accosted by several muggers with weapons. A "selfless" person would jump right in there to help. But many if not most of us will weigh any action based on several factors, including our own safety. You call that "selfish". I have to disagree with you vehemently on that.’
It's not about my views of selfishness. It’s about whether I’m correctly characterizing the early economists’ conflation of morally neutral instrumental rationality with an egoistic presumption about our acting fundamentally in our self-interest (maximizing our utility, which negates the possibility of true selflessness).
I understand that I’m making a harsh criticism of economics, and that I’m not an expert on any of this. But you’re now the second economist who’s responded to this series of critical articles in a highly defensive manner. If economics had nothing to hide, its defenders wouldn’t be so brittle. You resort to strawman and personal attacks, and then quit. The other fellow got quite emotional and personal in defending his beloved economics.
You keep saying economics is a science, but of course I dispute that that’s so. If a real science were criticized for being little more than politicized propaganda, its defenders wouldn’t have to strawman the criticisms or stoop to emotional ad hominem (like the other economist did in response to the other two, longer articles). He or she would just calmly explain the errors behind the criticism or would just ignore the latter altogether.
So you should at least be getting the criticisms right. For example, you say I’m personally attacking you by criticizing economists in general which therefore includes you. But I said the article is about classical and neoclassical (early modern) economists. More recent economists are cagier about where they stand because their field is less unified (as I understand it), but to the extent that the earlier liberal ideology informs their work, the criticisms apply to today’s economists too.
That doesn’t mean there are no exceptions. Economics has become more politicized, so economists don’t agree on all these fundamentals. Thus, I never presumed you personally were part of the problems at issue. On the contrary, I noted that you rejected Smith’s defense of capitalism, so some of these criticisms were superfluous for you.
Also, you ridicule the notion that economists are training Western society to be narcissistic. I lay this out in the other two articles which I don’t think you’ve read (links below). Obviously, I don’t say that economists have a central role in any of this. What I say is that economists are propagandists for a kind of capitalism that ends in plutocracy. My other two articles go into how this propaganda changed from the earlier, more ideological period, to the later, more eclectic, model-building one.
What’s training us to be consumers, of course, is the host of usual suspects: capitalism, big business, advertising, monopolies, the military-industrial-entertainment complex, the capitalist takeover of government functions (corporate lobbyists, campaign contributions, the revolving door, etc), democratic demagoguery, fast-moving and addictive social media, the professionalization of the academic humanities, the decadence of the progressive, professional class, and so on. By contrast, as I’ve said explicitly in the other two articles, most economists have been just cheerleaders for the economic part of this process.
The circularity in this training is just that early modern economists (and liberal humanistic philosophers) tried to make the best of the implosion of the medieval mindset of European Christendom, by positing the state of nature (the worst-case scenario) and by assuring us that everything would work out even without a deus ex machina. That was Smith’s argument, and Locke made roughly the same defense of democracy. The US and France heeded that advice in setting up their revolutionary free societies, using that liberal rhetoric in their civic myths. Thus began our training as “modern” citizens. We were taught to trust that secular free society would work out for the best, and we explained away any apparent defects that threaten to take us back to the state of nature, such as the rise of demagoguery or of monopolies and plutocracies.
You think it’s “sad” that I appeal merely to the movie “Wall Street” to illustrate the selfishness of consumers. I agree that that would be sad if that were the only possible evidence. I just took as read the mountain of evidence about how free societies progress by using up disproportionate amounts of the world’s resources; by wasting all kinds of goods; by allowing our desires to be manufactured by large corporations, so we end up buying much more than we need or ought to want; by depending on slave labour in authoritarian, poor countries to generate the products we gobble up, and so on. So I think it’s sadder that you’d quibble here instead of dealing directly with the underlying problem.
You say, ‘There are many of us [economists] who are up in arms about grotesque income and wealth inequality that is the result of the "free market" laissez faire system that has hijacked a natural economic system for personal greed.’
I’m sure there are some socialist or left-wing economists who feel that way. But I’d predict that if Americans were polled about whether they associate economists with such criticisms of capitalist excesses, the overall verdict would be negative. Even left-wing Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman defend capitalism. “Socialist” economists (like Richard Wolff), who have more radical criticisms of capitalism, are practically unheard of in the American public square.
Economists generally aren’t known for being critical of capitalism itself; instead, they’re more likely to be regarded as cheerleaders for the laissez faire system. Perhaps that’s an unfair caricature, and perhaps economists are no longer so monolithic. But economists once were united in this (a century or two ago), and that’s when the cultural damage was done.
As I explain in my second article, the current eclecticism in economics makes it harder for economists to unite and to attempt to undo that damage. Even if many economists opposed the negative results of capitalism, how could they unite in making their opposition publicly known when their discipline has been fragmented by a patchwork-plethora of models? Economics has become tribal and relativistic like the rest of consumer society.
Anyway, sorry that this kind of examination wasn’t for you. I take myself only to be experimenting with these criticisms. I’m not an expert on economics, and I’m only pushing the line of argument as far as it goes to test its merit. Clearly, that seems to offend economists, which to me suggests that the criticisms are on the right track. But I’m not so naïve as to think I’ve proved my case.
