Economy Unmasked
This book is all you need to know about economics and the economists...
The fact that economics is very complicated seems like a sign of seriousness. What if economists hid behind jargon? Because what are they talking about, really? Physicists debate, among other things, the falling of bodies and the expansion of the universe, chemists debate explosives, biologists debate genetic mutations, the GMOs they manufacture, cloning, and AIDS... But what about economists? Are they so different from sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers? "And how so!" they cry, arguing for the new nobility of their discipline, sanctified by a Nobel Prize. In truth, this prize is offered by the Bank of Sweden in honor of Alfred Nobel and is not a real prize, awarded by the Nobel Foundation....
Jacques Attali, a great economist if ever there was one, defined an economist as "one who is always able to masterfully explain the next day why he was wrong the day before." Keynes said roughly the same thing and recommended to his peers a modest, subordinate position, comparable to that of dentists, capable of treating with instruments, medicines, and methods that they did not invent. He affirmed that tomorrow "we simply do not know". The economist is and will forever be confronted with the iron wall of uncertainty....
But the reasoning power of economists is taking a real hit. There are two unmistakable signs. The first is the admission by 2001 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz concerning his time at the World Bank, and the orthodox economic policy of the latter and the IMF1. The second concerns the awarding of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics to a psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, who recounts what my friend Alain and his idol Keynes have always known: namely that men are not, but not at all, "economically rational."
Next, an economist must tell the social story. Evoking economics independently of sociology, psychology, and anthropology is a decoy that leads us to believe that economics is the matrix, the higher science, the explanatory mold in which social complexity must dissolve. Fortunately, secondary school curricula (still) make a lot of room for disciplines analyzing society. Secondary school teaches "economic and social sciences" we start with Max Weber, we don't forget Marx, and we devote a lot of time to what we call the social bond, with its conflicts and inequalities. We reflect on work and wealth. In higher education, all these words disappear and are replaced by signs, graphs, and equations. It is no longer a question of saying what is, but what must be: the market economy. The spirit of finesse, linked to the multidisciplinarity of the secondary field, is succeeded by the spirit of geometry, which no longer claims to understand the world, but to measure it, to format it according to economic calculation and the ideology of calculation. Why? To make good little soldiers of the "economic war", this war of all against all that will occupy you for many years before a meager retirement. Certainly, young professors denounce (finally!) this "autism" of university teaching...
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