I appreciate your effort in providing the references, and I’m sure those texts would enrich the discussion, but your reply is disappointing, isn’t it? You’re talking mostly about a semantic issue. When you hear “neoclassical economics,” you think of a myriad of textbooks and models. When non-economists use the term, they’re making a generalization about the overall views and approaches of mainstream modern economics. So it doesn’t matter if this or that textbook supports this or that quibble of yours, not if the generalization is applicable.
See the first article linked below for the relation between neoclassical economics and neoliberalism: “Neoclassical economics is most closely related to classical liberalism, the intellectual forefather of neoliberalism. In a sense, the neoliberal movement between 1960 and 1980 represented a partial return to the neoclassical assumptions about economic policy and partial rejection of the failed central planning arguments of the 1930s.
“As far as public policy is concerned, neoliberalism borrowed from the assumptions of neoclassical economics to argue for free trade, low taxes, low regulation and low government spending. It often deviated in terms of anti-trust and externality arguments.”
And see my article’s point about the revolving door between big business and the regulators and public sector in the US, which blows up the claim that political and public policy questions are irrelevant to the “science” of economics, as though the leading economists were working in isolation in a real Ivory Tower (with no consultancy or government jobs, etc.).
On your nonsense about ceteris paribus laws, see Alfred Marshall’s “Principles of Economics”: in analyzing a whole system, and breaking it up into its parts, as it were, the economist (or the special scientist in general) “segregates those disturbing causes, whose wanderings happen to be inconvenient, for the time in a pound called Ceteris Paribus. The study of some group of tendencies is isolated by the assumption other things being equal: the existence of other tendencies is not denied, but their disturbing effect is neglected for a time.”
Regarding the appendix, its point isn’t to criticize neoclassical economics, but to show that that framework amounts to the orthodox or mainstream one. And I make that clear in the article.
Bizarrely, you appeal to the Christian fundamentalist Tom Gilson, whose apologetics I obliterated in several articles, and you do this to show that I have a habit of attacking strawmen. Can you show that I misrepresent Gilson in the articles linked below? Or do you just take such a character’s word for granted? Are you perhaps inclined to support Gilson because you share his brand of Christianity?
In general, though, your quibbles don’t interest me much. I’m a big picture guy. I do philosophy. Sure, if there were no connection between laissez-faire culture (including neoliberalism, the GOP, etc) and mainstream economics in the US, the big picture I draw here might be a grossly unfair caricature. But I’m afraid the connections are there, so my generalizations are fair (and perhaps insightful, if I do say so myself), which means your quibbles are red herrings.
