Benjamin Cain
1 min readDec 21, 2021

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I've recently supplied you with a list of links to back up the Inside Job documentary's assessment, in another comment. For your convenience, I've copied them below. So that's enough of that.

If economists' models of capitalism are approximately true, as you suggest, does that mean that people ought to approximate the levels of selfishness needed to fulfill the conditions set out by the models?

Or are you trying to have it both ways? To be scientifically respectable, economists must be talking somehow about the real world, not sheer fantasies that no one cares about. Yet to avoid blame for the consequences of trying to approximate the free market conditions, namely the looming ecological catastrophe, economists can fall back on the hedging that makes their models irrelevant to reality.

And I'm not supposed to compare that casuistry to the theologian's fudging? Think again.

https://academic.oup.com/cje/article/36/1/43/1716631

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2021/09/04/conflicts-of-interest-may-bias-research-in-finance-and-economics/

https://rabble.ca/columnists/economists-conflicts-interest-and-plea-journalists/

https://slate.com/business/2011/01/if-they-read-their-own-research-economists-might-disclose-conflicts-of-interest-more-often.html

http://triplecrisis.com/conflicts-of-interest-and-the-financial-crisis/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203436904577148940410667970

https://fortune.com/2012/02/10/for-economists-new-disclosures-same-problems/

https://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132808672/should-economists-reveal-who-pays-them

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-academics-conflicts-idUSTRE6BJ3LF20101220

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/fifty-shades-of-qe-conflicts-of-interest-in-economic-research/

https://www.economist.com/schumpeter/2011/01/27/conflicts-of-interest

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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