I enjoyed econ and I see no reason to argue with it but like the problem is, ok they have the chapter on market failures. Like what if market failures are HUGE in scale? You know there's the one chapter and then they move "ok but the rest of this is true....". What if market failures are MOST of the story? The textbook should be 95% market failure and 5% equilibrium stuff.
This is why Marx's Capital is far and away the best explanation of capitalism that's ever been written. I genuinely think even people who are pro-capitalism should read it if they really want to understand how capitalism works.
Bourgeois economics has no interest in scratching beneath the surface of things. To them, capitalism is the status quo and many of them think it's simply the way the world works and has always worked. I have yet to see a bourgeois economist ever concern themselves with understanding, for example, really why market failures actually exist or how pervasive they are.
Michael Hudson makes the point that’s it not even just capitalism that economics departments don’t question anymore, but also specifically neoliberal economics. All the old timers like Adam smith, Ricardo, etc we’re concerned about keeping markets free from domination by rentier interests so that they’d be more productive. But they apparently got around that by just scrapping any study of the history of economic thought in Econ departments altogether. The term “Free market” has essentially been retconned to mean free FOR rentier exploitation, rather than free FROM it.
It tends to be pinned onto a very specific group of people or on outside situations that "can't be controlled". Funny enough, they NEVER successfully predict this stuff happening, and the "rebuilding" they do is usually the worst case scenario
I enjoyed econ and I see no reason to argue with it but like the problem is, ok they have the chapter on market failures. Like what if market failures are HUGE in scale? You know there's the one chapter and then they move "ok but the rest of this is true....". What if market failures are MOST of the story? The textbook should be 95% market failure and 5% equilibrium stuff.
This is why Marx's Capital is far and away the best explanation of capitalism that's ever been written. I genuinely think even people who are pro-capitalism should read it if they really want to understand how capitalism works.
Bourgeois economics has no interest in scratching beneath the surface of things. To them, capitalism is the status quo and many of them think it's simply the way the world works and has always worked. I have yet to see a bourgeois economist ever concern themselves with understanding, for example, really why market failures actually exist or how pervasive they are.
Michael Hudson makes the point that’s it not even just capitalism that economics departments don’t question anymore, but also specifically neoliberal economics. All the old timers like Adam smith, Ricardo, etc we’re concerned about keeping markets free from domination by rentier interests so that they’d be more productive. But they apparently got around that by just scrapping any study of the history of economic thought in Econ departments altogether. The term “Free market” has essentially been retconned to mean free FOR rentier exploitation, rather than free FROM it.
It tends to be pinned onto a very specific group of people or on outside situations that "can't be controlled". Funny enough, they NEVER successfully predict this stuff happening, and the "rebuilding" they do is usually the worst case scenario