No Bosses by Michael Albert;

Author:Michael Albert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network
Published: 2021-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

An Anti-Academic Addendum

Perhaps you have had the experience of taking an economics course in college or have otherwise heard economists claim that markets permit producers and consumers to fulfill their desires without external imposition, without waste, and supremely efficiently. Economists even prove that a mathematical model that they say captures the essence of market exchange has these delightful properties.

The problem is that their model and the reality they say their model “models” diverge dramatically. Imagine that I model war as including many people, severe disagreement, a few guns, and no dying. Then I examine my model for the properties of war. My model leaves out too much that matters. Economic theory is like that.

Briefly, the economists’ model assumes—among other falsehoods—that market buyers and sellers are all small and weak and unable to themselves affect prices. It also simplistically models their behavior as maximizing profit or surplus and maximizing personal preference fulfillment, and it then proves the model will have various properties. For example, it won’t waste things. Yet strangely, in our economy 40 percent of all produced food is wasted. That alone—and there are many such glaring gaps between claims about the model and facts of worldly outcomes—should terminate people pointing to such models instead of pointing to reality to learn about reality. It does that, at least to an extent, for some high-powered more realistic economists, but not for the economics we learn in economics 101 or from media pundits’ rhetoric.

Further, and more instructively, even if reality did act like the economic models and thus did attain what the models call “efficiency,” what is that? The word efficiency is used by economists and their business paymasters to rally support for whatever they favor, but the word is rarely carefully considered. We all like efficiency when we think it means attaining desired ends without wasting things we value. Who would oppose that? No one wants to not attain what we seek. No one wants to waste what we value. And so no one wants to be called inefficient. But here is the rub.

Efficiency really means attaining the ends you seek, whatever those may be. It means not wasting things you value, whatever anyone else may think about the things you value. So, if you seek profit and you don’t value the lives of workers or the health of your workplace neighbors, you should cut workers’ pay and speed up workers’ tasks while you scrimp on their safety and simultaneously dump waste into neighboring water supplies or spew it into the sky. In fact, given market aims and what markets do and don’t value, for workplaces to not impoverish workers and to not dump pollution would be “inefficient.”

Typical economists overly abstract their models. They leave out workers’ well-being, social relations, and the environment. They then use the label efficient to appear credible and curry favor. Economists who do this are either incredibly stupid, or they know better but have succumbed to the pressure of accommodating those who pay their salaries or publish their writings.

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