It is a popular mythology by politicians and intellectuals to claim the economics profession is a bastion of free market fundamentalism. Consider Fred Blocks recent book on The Power of Market Fundamentalism and how these ideas in practice impoverish the many while enriching the few. Here is his interview for INET on his work. Of course, Block is in some sense a long time critic of the economics profession for its market fundamentalism, so this isnt new. The attitude he expresses has been voiced for generations. Even in the heyday of Samuelson and the neoclassical synthesis --- which combined neoclassical market failure theory micro with Keynesian macroeconomic theory, the heterodox critics found a way to claim that the economics profession was dominated by free market fundamentalism. One of the most interesting social theorist of the second half of the 20th century, Albert Hirschman talked about the incredible influence as market fundamentalist that Mises, Hayek and Friedman had over our intellectual culture -- while he was secure with his royal academic position at the Institute for Advanced Study. I personally do not stress the martyrdom narrative for Mises and Hayek, but the reality is that their positions were relatively speaking far from the academic royalty status that their critics enjoyed. They persisted (and James Buchanan should be included here as well) against all odds. One of the most absurd claims I ever read was in the work of Alice Amsden and Lance Taylor, The Market Meets its Match, which was originally published in 1995. The book claims that free market reforms in post communism must be declared an utter failure, and that the entire move toward market reforms was because of the intellectual dominience in the economics profession and the policy community of the aprioristic reasoning of Ludwig von Mises and the dogmatic quasi-religious faith in Hayekian spontaneous order. Readers should note that post-communism begins in 1989, and goes through a variety of starts and stops, and post-communism in Russia proper, only begins in 1992. So the time frame for this natural experiment is very short-lived if you consider the time delays in publishing an academic book. So the arm chair theorizing Amsden and Taylor accuse the market fundamentalist of engaging in to the great harm of humanity must not be limited to the fundamentalist, but also to the critics as well since experience could not have been the reason for the judgment passed in this book. Amsden siting at MIT and Taylor in New York at the New School, both endowed professors, theorized that somehow they and their ideas were the downtrodden in the world of economics, and Mises and Hayek were the annoited royalty of the profession.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 19:35:14 +0000
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