That's right, I haven't changed many of my views on economics because you didn't convince me. That's because we were often talking past each other, in that you were talking about economic details whereas my thesis operates at the level of philosophy and sociology.
The only change I can think of that resulted from our dialogue is that I learned that the heterodox economists have gained more sway over the field in recent years (which prompted me to write a follow-up to my article on economists' apologies for elite sociopathy).
Still, there's such a thing as economic orthodoxy, and it's beholden to the neoclassical agenda, if not to particular models or findings. The agenda is the scientistic one of treating economies as though they were physical mechanisms that can be mathematically modelled with great precision. That agenda itself entails that markets are capable of being run efficiently, which counts against government regulation. This framework or agenda, though, is found behind the scenes, which means the issues here are sociological. I'm talking about economists' philosophical presuppositions and tribal allegiances.
What economists tend to publish, of course, is gibberish to the average person. So that's hardly a case of being up-front about what economists believe. And the public would trust that what looks like gibberish is actually arcane knowledge if the discourse resulted in a flurry of technological applications, as is the case with the hard sciences. Whatever successes you think economists have in their discipline's favour, they're offset by massive failures and blind spots. Hence, the orthodox economist's academic jargon isn't automatically trustworthy, which means there's room for an alternative explanation of it, such as the one I provide: the hyper-mathematical formulations in orthodox economics are hiding something.
This is only a critical model of economic orthodoxy. I never said the model is proven. So if I'm still talking about my view of economics, I'm proposing it as a model, not as a fully-tested theory or as a necessary truth, or anything like that. You don't think the model is well-supported. That's fine, but you're hardly a neutral judge, are you?
