Rev Left Radio - Confronting Neoclassical Economics

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

William Chaney returns to the show, this time to discuss macro economics, criticize neoclassical economics from a marxist perspective, The Center for Popular Economics, how economics attempts to naturalize capitalism, neoliberalism as applied libertarianism, and much more!  Check out the Center for Popular Economics: https://www.populareconomics.org   economics for emancipation (course in radical economics 101 for activists) — https://economics4emancipation.net rethinking economics 101 (course in heterodox economics 101 for students) — https://www.rethinkeconomics.org/econ101/   shoutouts/partners in the rethinking economics 101 course: — ecological economics for all  — institute for new economic thinking  — united states society for ecological economics Outro Music: "strange arithmetic" by the coup    --------------------------   Support Rev Left Radio on Patreon or make a one time donation

And, you know, this comes back to a thing I know has been said on this show a bunch, right? You know, those who say they are not ideological are actually the most ideological, right? Because we never get back to questioning, you know, what is this definition of efficiency? You know, if you start to ask those questions, then you're just, you know, forcing me to accept your value judgments and you're an evil collectivist. Yeah, absolutely. So, so I just want us to have two quick points. I say, one, this is why you're, you need philosophy. I think it, you know, not that philosophers are widely respected with an academia, but philosophy does keep other fields sort of in check. I know like Neil de Gros Tyson will often say, like he comes out of entirely out of STEM, like, oh, we don't need philosophy

anymore. We have science. And then he'll go on to say some insane fucking presumptive thing that a 101 philosophy class would have corrected in him. And it just kind of proves the point that he doesn't know what he's talking about. But I think that's also obviously true. in economics because, you know, just this conversation already, I'm by no means a philosopher, but I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy. I kind of have that orientation in my mind. And the first thing I do is start going to bedrock assumptions and fundamental premises. And that is very inconvenient for the neoclassical economist. So that's why we need philosophy, folks. But the second thing I wanted to say is that whenever I hear an economist say the words value neutral, I reach for my

gun because there is nothing neutral about neoclassical or capitalist economics whatsoever and they have very value laden outcomes right very moral outcomes immoral outcomes and so i think like to try to try to set aside any sort of value orientation or any sort of bedrock moral value system is very convenient for a system that is amoral at best and often immoral in practice. Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have a really important episode, I think, one focusing on economics and importantly on neoclassical economics, the sort of reigning economic orthodoxy of our time. You know, the predominant economic theory in, you know, especially Ivy League schools around the country.

I see it as the sort of economic ideological corollary of neoliberalism and libertarianism writ large. And so today I have one, my friend Will Cheney, who was actually on a year or so ago to talk about Louis Althusair. I'll link that show in the show notes for those interested in that episode. But he's back this time to discuss the Center for Popular Economics. working in tandem with the Center for Economic Democracy. And in this conversation, we discuss neoclassical economics, what it is, what are some of its assumptions, what are the debates within it, what are heterodox economic schools of thought, from Keynesianism to feminism, to ecological economics, to decolonial economics,

and of course, Marxian economics, and we just kind of cover the whole gamut. So we really give people an introduction to some basic economic ideas for those that like most of you have not necessarily studied economics or taken college level courses of economics but if you're listening to a show like this you're an intellectual and you want to learn so we're going to provide that today kind of an econ 101 as well as a of course skeptical marxist criticism of neoclassical economics we talk about adam smith we talk about the importance of philosophy we talk about the ways in which neoclassical economics sort of protects itself from investigations into some of its core premises, and we touch on a lot of topics.

This is a two-hour conversation. So again, it is for, I think, simultaneously the person who is an amateur but wants to learn about economics, this is perfect for you, as well as the person perhaps in college right now studying economics. There'll be plenty within this conversation that will get your mind thinking and that you'll find engaging as well. So for the amateur and the person who is studying to become an expert, I think this conversation is simultaneously useful for both sides of that coin. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can join us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio.

And in exchange for $5 a month, you get hours and hours of bonus content, three episodes a month of completely bonus content where oftentimes it's me letting my hair down and, you know, riffing up. things I don't always get the chance to riff on on the public feed. But in addition to that, you also get the entire Patreon backlog of over six years of Revel F's Patreon. So there are hundreds at this point, I have to assume, hundreds of bonus episodes that for $5 a month, you'll immediately get full access to. And we really, really appreciated it. It supports both me and my family as well as Dave and his entire family. And it's deeply appreciated. So if you value what we do, That's a great way to help. But, of course, I know these are hard times.

Inflation is kicking my ass as well. Not everybody has $5 to spare. And if that's the case for you, leaving a positive review for Rev Left or, you know, guerrilla history or Red Menace on your favorite podcast app is a wonderful way to help pump the algorithm to our benefit. Sharing episodes like this with people who you think might be interested in it is another way to spread the show and get new ears listening.

So, yeah, that would be very, very appreciated for anybody who does anything like that so there's your option but yeah without further ado here's my conversation with will cheney on neoclassical economics and how to confront it enjoy good to be here brett thanks for having me back uh it's always a pleasure and an honor so my name is uh will cheney i'm a graduate student at the the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the famous radical economics department, and I'm currently the director of the Center for Popular Economics, which is a collective of economists who are essentially and have been since 1979 working to bring economics to the people, you know,

in an accessible way that actually, you know, makes sense. And so most of what we've done over the past 40 years, or a lot of what we've done, is to produce a kind of a summer camp, you know, the Summer Institute on Radical Economics 101 for activists. And we put that on, I think, every year up until the pandemic, and then it went online. And we're currently working to build our capacity back to start putting them on in person again. And we've also made some publications, anything from articles. I think we've done a couple books. We've made, you know,

YouTube media, and we're trying to get more into, you know, audiovisual type stuff. But, yeah, we train activists. You know, for the most part, our target audience is, you know, radicals who have never, you know, had the joy of suffering through an economics class in college. Or, you know, maybe they did and they didn't, you know, get a lot out of it, which is pretty common.

since economics is a pretty inaccessible discipline. So, yeah, that's my organization. We've partnered with, we'll bring up, you know, two other organizations, I think, later that we've partnered with to create alternative economics courses. One of them is rethinking economics, which is a network of economists and student groups. It was founded, I think, in 2011. and they just reopened up the USA section. You know, the chapters in the United States because it's an international organization

just, I think, about two years ago. And so one of the main things we're talking about today is going to be related to that. And the other organization we've partnered with is the Center for Economic Democracy, which is also working to not only popularize economics, but also to make, you know, real, you know, democratic economic arrangements a reality. And I guess this will become a real a bit later. All these organizations are very pluralist,

you know, so there's no hardline theory. There's no, you know, party line for these organizations. You know, they embrace a multitude of different, you know, economic theories. Yeah. Cool. Well, it's an honor to have you back on the show. Of course, listeners might remember you from our episode, I think about maybe within a year or so ago on Louis Althusair's Marxist theory and philosophy, an episode that I'll link to in the show notes of this episode for people who want to go and listen to another conversation with you and I. But I really like this. I think it's really important. You mentioned that economics can often be inaccessible, can be hard, even intimidating for people to get into for my entire politically conscious life, economics,

was really weaponized by neoliberals and libertarians. There's this old saying, you know, I think it's kind of fell in out of popular culture at this point. But 10, 15 years ago, it was always like you were being told if you were a socialist or on the left whatsoever to learn economics from, you know, libertarian and conservatives who would sort of shove that in your face. And so that was sort of a long-running thing that they were weaponizing this idea that they understood economics and the socialist left, the Marxist left. doesn't really understand it. And of course, when you understand Marxism, you understand it's completely focused on political economy. And Capital, his magnum opus, was of course all about political economy. But at the same time, I think a lot of people are sort of unsure how to meet arguments at the level of academia, of mainstream academia. And I think it's really important

that people learn. My experience in college, for example, was an interesting one where I was sort of immediately outing myself in the class as somebody who's pretty talkative in class as the lefty. And I remember staying after class, as I was still learning Marxism and socialism myself, I was kind of out of my depth because, of course, I'm debating a college professor of economics, but I would stay after class and sort of have friendly debates with him about economics and poverty and the implications of neoclassical or libertarian forms of economics, etc so i think uh you know that was always an interesting experience it wasn't bad for me but um it was very i very quickly realized that the sort of mainstream ideas in an economics in

academia whether we're talking at the community college level the state university or the ivy league um level are really you know sort of focused in a lot of ways the way i felt was justifying the status quo justifying capitalism capitalism of course was taken as a given as a an a priori assumption that you build economics off of and it wasn't even allowed to really be questioned um you would be laughed out of an economics room in some places if you even tried to question that premise does does all of that more or less jive with with your experience or what you think the average person's experience with economics can be on the left oh my goodness I was just uh kind of imagining that we had taken the same class uh I had uh exactly that experience I had

I mean, when I was, before coming to college, I had already been brainwashed by Richard Wolfe's class videos. And, yeah, by the time when I got to college, and I declared that I'm an economics major pretty much right away, that was the exact experience. And fortunately, I had two, especially two really open-minded professors, you know. The one was very libertarian, and the other was very Austrian, you know, and hence libertarian and Austrian economics. But they were really open to, like, actually having these conversations. And I'm really thankful for those experiences because, you know, most of the time and, you know, many other economics professors that I had, you know, they treat, especially Marxism, but they treat really anything outside of the one chosen theory, which is neoclassical economics, you know, kind of been this condescending, you know, dismissal, you know, they can't really say a lot about Marxist economics. or, you know, even, you know, honestly, Keynesian economics, the parts of that that are not been taken over by Marxist,

or by neoclassical theory. And, yeah, there's really no discussion there. I mean, this, it, uh, it is truly impressive how the field of economics as, you know, almost unlike any other field, you know, at that level, at the college level, has been able to just have one theory and to effectively just ignore, belittle, you know, make fun of, make it imposterousyed. really to study anything else. And that's a big inspiration for the, you know, creation of the Center for Popular Economics and also these courses. So, yeah, I completely agree.

I mean, that's been my experience entirely. For sure, yeah. And of course, you're talking about the Center for Popular Economics or the Center for Economic Democracy. And one of the points I've been thinking about recently, you know, in my own life just sort of like when my mind is talking to itself all the time is, you know, the transition from from feudalism to capitalism could be the hallmark of that transition could be the introduction of democracy into the political realm. Now, we can talk about all the limitations of bourgeois democracy, of parliamentaryism, of electoralism, et cetera, for sure. But of course, that transition was important. That shift away from just, you know, monarchical feudal relationships and power structures to constitutional monarchies

eventually to parliamentary democracies, that was an advancement for the masses of people to have at least somewhat of a say at certain times in certain places and how their lives are controlled and run. And I think that the next historical jump from capitalism into socialism is going to be hallmarked by the introduction of democracy into the economic realm, right? Into the workplace, into the economy at large, where regular people can start to shape the economy to serve our interests instead of how it is under capitalism, which is that unless you are in the bourgeoisie, if you are at any level of the proletariat, you exist to serve the economy. And we've seen this over and over again where the economy is almost, it's almost the golden

calf of modernity. It is the thing that is worshipped so, so diligently that people don't even recognize that they're worshiping, right? The free market. The idea that capitalism in and of itself is more important than anything else, including, you know, human well-being. And the idea that like during COVID, it's more important for us to get out and risk our lives to go to work than it is for, you know, than even the risk of possibly hurting the economy, which is ultimately this profit machine for the owning class. So, you know, I really like that framing. And of course, that's something that just by the title of these organizations that we're talking about seems to really agree with and want to push forward. Does that sound right to you?

Oh, absolutely. I think, you know, we'll get to this in a bit, but part of the reason why neoclassical theory, neoclassical economics, was chosen by the system as the dominant economic theory is because it has these effects, right? The consequences of that are as exactly as you say, right? We have this kind of artificial separation between the economy and then politics, or, you know, you know, ideology, culture, you know, the other parts of society. And, you know, even an argument, which I found very convincing, you know, as a yogurt person, right, that we have, you know, democracy and politics. But, you know, why not in the economy?

Neoclassical economics kind of gives this answer, right? Which is, you know, either it's irrational, right? It doesn't make sense for workers to control, you know, the factory because, you know, the boss. you know, has that knowledge or the boss is more efficient, you know, those kinds of conclusions come out of economics. Or there's, there's often like a more insidious answer with neoclassical theory. And that's that we already have democracy, right? You have the freedom to go buy anything in the market. And since the capitalists have to respond to whatever the consumer wants, then we actually have democracy, you know, in the workplace through the market, right? Which, of

course we know is is you know it doesn't make any you know sense when you start to look at the real world and i think we'll get more to that later but um absolutely do i mean this this is the ideological functions right um you know that that uh prevent those discussions from happening yeah right definitely and and in that same vein of the feudalist to capitalist um argumentation i was advancing a second ago you know monarchists of course saw us and by us i mean the masses right you and i and our families, regular toiling people at that time we were peasants, saw us as unfit for political democracy, unthinkable that the rabble like us could have any say in how states functioned and worked, right?

And, of course, we struggled, struggled for hundreds of years, overcame that obstacle. But today in a very similar way, capitalists see us as fundamentally unworthy and unfit for economic democracy, for having any say in the workplace or in the economy at large. And that sort of condescending, patronizing, you know, looking down on the toilers, on the rabble. It's still very much with us. It's just been pushed back, you know, one yard or two yards back from where it was under feudalism, but it's still

basically the same, you know, fundamental unworthiness. We are merely here to work. We are commodities to be bought and sold by capitalists and put to work for their profit accumulation. And that's about it. And so the idea that we could walk into a workplace and not just have a union, but run a workplace democratically or that we would have councils of communities coming together to try to figure out what needs to be produced for actual meeting human needs and what is utterly superfluous, right? This is just unthinkable to our overlords and our rulers. And so with all that in mind, I think it behooves us to try to grapple with these economics, these mainstream economics and the ideology that they are undergirded by and undergird themselves. So let's go ahead and get into that.

And the first question I want to ask is, we mentioned neoclassical economics. So what is neoclassical economics? Why is it dominant in the field of economics broadly? And why does it matter? Right, out, absolutely. So, as I mentioned, economics is kind of unique in that it has one chosen theory, right? Neoclassical economics. Neoclassical economics is the extension of,

of classical economics. That's why it's, you know, the Neo. So the classical economics is the original economists or at the first people in the era of capitalism to write about these questions. You know, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, those are kind of the big ones. So neoclassical economics kind of took over

from classical economics when it fell into crisis. You know, there was, so, you know, the timeline on this, right? Adam Smith writes his book, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776, and David Ricardo around that time, a little bit later. And so for a couple hundred years, or, you know, about 150 years, I guess, you know, classical economics was dominant, right? And this is a theory that praises capitalism, right? it says, you know, we have this, you know, wonderful new economic system that leads to social harmony, right? Everybody can be selfish and make, you know, these decisions that are best for them, and it's going to lead to these outcomes that are the best for everybody, right? So classical economics produced a lot of arguments that were useful in, you know, ending the feudalist system, right?

they were useful for this transition to the capitalist system. But the classical economists kind of promised more than the actual system could deliver, right? So, you know, to take the motto of the French Revolution as some kind of benchmark, right, freedom, equality, you know, fraternity, the real capitalism did not really produce those results, right? So there was, you know, this crisis, you know, of a mismatch between like, you know, we're all supposed to be rich at some point, but, you know, that's not really happening. And actually, you know, if you look at it this way or that way, people are kind of worse off now, right, than in feudalism. Another kind of major, you know, set of problems was these kind of, like, logical inconsistencies. So the classical economists predicted this, like, you know, steady state, which means the economy is going to, you know, to slow down over time.

It's going to stop growing. It's going to stop being innovative. But they couldn't really explain why, you know. So those were those kinds of issues, which we couldn't get into. They're pretty boring. I don't think they don't matter too much. But then there was the challenge of Marxian economics, right? So Marx basically, you know, took up these assumptions of the classical economists, you know,

and took their value theory and showed that using that value, theory. The capitalist system is actually, you know, pretty bad, right? It's actually extremely irrational, right? It folds itself into crises all the time. And at the core, it's exploitative, right? The workers, you know, get paid, as I'm sure most listeners on the show do, right? But, you know, it's always worth saying. The workers get paid less than the value of what they produce, right? And so neoclassical economics emerged in the late 1800s and was pretty dominant by like 1910, 1920. You know, there was some textbooks. One of the big ones is Alfred Marshall's textbook that kind of synthesized the ideas. But basically, you know, to finally get to the question, neoclassical economics,

changes. It's like classical economics. It praises the capitalist system. You know, it says if everybody, you know, does what their selfish interests are, then we're going to get, you know, social harmony. We're going to get the best result for everybody. But it changes the value theory. So instead of value or, you know, kind of the exploitation of prices, you know, really like value, you know, in terms of like how the system works, value, value, was taken from labor and from people doing work, and they transformed that concept to be on the demand side, right? Instead of in production, it's on the consumption side. And actually, value is not how much labor goes into producing a commodity, or a good or service, but value is only how much someone is willing to pay for it. And so, this group, the proto-neoclassicals, if you know, the people right before, they were called the marginalist economists.

And so they kind of produced this idea that value is actually just what people are willing to pay for commodities. And so, if you take up that perspective, then prices are fair. And actually, exploitation kind of disappears, right? You know, there's no more mismatch between price and value. value because value is just price, right? And price is just directly expresses value. And so the neoclassical economists, right, they made that, that first big change. So they changed what does it mean, you know, what is value, right? What is the definition of that? From labor to how much people are willing to pay, right, for stuff. Pausing right there, that was the attack on this labor theory of

value advanced by Marxism, right? Exactly. Yeah, that was the response. Right. Right. Um, So, yeah, to kind of, another way to look to define neoclassical economics is that it has three basic concepts that it uses, you know, in conjunction with this value theory, but it uses these three basic determinant, you know, ultimate causes, you know, to explain everything else in the economy. So a neoclassical explanation, and this is similar to the classical, right, but this is specifically, you know, the neoclassical formulation is you can tell a story about the economy if you look at the resources, like the resource endowments that people have, or countries or whatever, a business, you know, what resources do they have that could be, you know, metal, it could be, you know, skills, right? It could be a lot of things. But the resources that you have, combining those with technology,

Right. What technologies we've produced, you know, what are available. And then the third concept is our preferences. So any neoclassical explanation can use these three, you know, givens, right? They're kind of taken as assumptions, what resources you have, what technology you have, and most importantly, what people's preferences are. And preference or preferences is a concept. which means, you know, how much are you willing to pay for something, right? How much do you want that pair of shoes versus how much do you want that haircut, right? So your preferences lead to your choices. So to kind of put this all together as simply as I can, the stories or the neoclassical economic theory is a set of stories about individuals making decisions based on their preferences. and based on the resources that they have and the technology available. So it's the story of making choices under material constraints. Most neoclassical economists are humanists, right?

They want to tell the story at the level of the individual. And even the neoclassical economists who kind of go up to the structural level and are structural, you know, structural determinants, They find their ultimate cause at the level of the structure. Even, you know, those economists usually refer, you know, intentionally, unintentionally. Sometimes they're aware or not, it doesn't matter. But neoclassical economists refer back to this idea of a rational individual. So it's popular nowadays for neoclassical economists to say, oh, we know that individuals are not rational, right?

they're not going to choose the best use of technology and resources and combine those to meet their wants or their needs. But that is a useful reference point. So that, you know, kind of teleological or, you know, that, you know, hyper rationalist, whatever you want to call it, you know, idea of the rational individual is always there in the backgrounds. And so the goal of the storytelling of the neoclassical, you know, theory becomes how do we recognize? How do we recognize? reconcile, you know, the conflicts between individuals, right? Individuals, all of us, have these, you know, preferences. We have these, you know, innate qualities, you know, unchangeable, cannot be determined by anything, right? Our preferences. How can we, you know, arrange the society

so that the individuals who are rational or, you know, trying to be rational, can be selfish and can get to an outcome that is the best for society. And the story always ends in equilibrium, right? This kind of harmonious state where the conflicts, you know, between people have been, you know, disappeared, you know, and everybody is as wealthy as they could be, right? Or the most efficient, right? There's certain standards that neoclassical economists use to say that this is the best, outcome for all of society, right? We couldn't do any better. Using this kind of framework of the storytelling, right, everybody is kind of rational. We want to set things up so that people can be selfish, you know, make the most important, or the most rational decisions, you know, leading to this

social harmony. Economics, neoclassical economics, then sets up certain debates. This is, you know, how the neoclassical you know economics exists it has these unresolved debates right these debates will actually never be resolved right because they're not supposed to be but they allow us to you know talk economics all day one example could be you know what is the best tax rate right if we you know want this result or we want this kind of social harmony you know we want to be kind of fair but we also don't you know, steal people's money and use it inefficiently, you know, what is the optimal tax rate? Never questioning, of course, you know, why taxes exist, the deeper questions are invisible. You know, another one would be how do we regulate businesses and change the incentives so that

businesses will adopt more green technology, right? So we could, you know, we can't question the underlying, you know, order, right? We can't say why we have this kinds of technology. Why the technology we have is destroying the planet? But what we could ask is how do we, you know, change the rules a little bit to try to get the businesses who, you know, businesses also become individuals in this theory, right? We think about businesses as individuals, right? How do we change the incentives, right? The, the rules, the punishments and the rewards. to get this outcome, right? And oh, goodness, there was this quote

from the Wall Street Journal a few years ago. Oh, I should have grabbed it, yeah, I could find it. But it was something to the effect of, without any irony, you know. They said, how can we make people choose the right thing and whatever the thing was? You know, how do we get people to make the right decisions about, you know, to freely choose, you know,

the best outcomes for climate change or whatever i could i could i should look that up again but um yeah okay so yeah these these questions that are generated within the field of economics are they're they're sort of this this um creation of certain assumptions and we don't look deeper than those assumptions so what is the optimal tax rate how much should you tax a billionaire the question of how can somebody amass a billion dollars without exploitation that's never even asked right how do we regulate businesses and change incentives such that businesses adopt more green technologies. But why capitalism incentivizes the creation of countless, needless, polluting commodities

and the externalization of those impacts on the public sphere with the privatization of profit, that's never asked, right? So in these ways, these seeming debates, just like there's a seeming debate between Democrats and Republicans, oh, there's this vociferous debate, but certain underlying assumptions and premises are never questioned or never to be questioned. And that's a real big problem, especially when economics and neoclassical economics in particular tries to present itself as a science, right? It's not a humanities. It is with the physics and the biologists and, you know, the chemists in that it is a more or less hard science. Sure, it may be a little fuzzier given that the

variables involved are like, you know, societies and economies and not like particles or you know, genes, but still, it is a science. But in any good science, you would have to ask those questions, right? You would have to dig deeper into the basic premises of what you're, of what you're trying to advance. And you could not get around them by simply asserting these questions without examining the underlying premises. Absolutely. And, you know, to kind of riff on, you know, the liberals and conservatives are at the Democrats and Republicans, you know, they tend to line up along one of the main dividing lines in almost every neoclassical debate, which is, you know, should we have private ownership, right? Should we have market allocation or should we have government ownership or planning, right? Government intervention, right? There's this dichotomy that always exists between the market and the government. And, you know, like you're saying, the externalities, right? So, if there is a cost or a benefit of a transaction, right? Okay, simplify that. So if you or if somebody

buys something and the person who bought it, you know, doesn't pay all the costs, right? There's actually costs of that commodity going to other people or there's benefits that are not paid for in the, in the exchange, then those are externalities. That's the official term, right? they're external to the market. To do a quick example, my partner and I just bought a car, right? So the car, you know, costs a certain amount of money. The car is going to produce pollution, which is a cost that everybody bears, right? Thing in nature.

But the cost, right, the actual, you know, negative happiness, right, that results from this transaction is not paid for by the buyer, right? you know on the flip side or the business right or the seller exactly yeah especially not the seller yeah and uh you know and it it goes both ways too there's also positive externalities um so the the classic you know example is education right when you get educated you know hopefully you're not paying anything i guess a lot of people do you know but the you know let's say the government's paying for the education, you know, and you, you know, pay for it by going there, but, you know, you get the education. So there's benefits that go to the people around you, right?

A more educated society, right, people having more knowledge, you know, and I'm kind of thinking of this in the abstract, not the way the real education system works, you know, but. But you can say something like in Germany or Denmark where higher education is completely free. There's a positive externalization of a more educated populace, right, without the burden of huge amounts of debt like we have here in the U.S. Exactly, most definitely. I would add Cuba to the list, too. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

And yeah, so, you know, the positive externalities, the negative externalities, you know, we don't really need to think about them because they're outside of this interaction, right? Or if we do think about them, you know, then we can spend the next, you know, 20 years or, you know, some amount of time trying to calculate what the value of those externalities are, right? and if we want to you know make the market outcome better then we just need to you know tax the car companies right we need to you know calculate what the value of environmental destruction is for this this car or whatever and we need to add that to the price because uh you know a lot of this a lot of the sneakiness right that uh that a lot of us uh you know see and experience when when con confronting neoclassical economics, a lot of the sneakiness comes back to that equation between value and price, right? Because value is automatically priced, then there's really, you know,

other than the case of externalities, we could do research on that, right? You know, but because consumers have decided, you know, freely, you know, to take part three, the preferences, right? Consumers, you know, millions of consumers have chosen to buy cars, you know, they're full. Or even though we know climate change is bad, right, the problem is not the economy, actually. The problem is consumers, you know, being short-sighted, right, or ignorant, right? And suddenly the problem has been pushed back on to the mass of people, right? And it's been deflected from these businesses. Yes, a lot of this conversation and you explaining neoclassical economics also, you know, my philosophical mind starts asking questions.

And one of those questions is the sort of presumption on the part of economists to use the individual as the core unit or metric, right, by which to begin your analysis. So the individual making rational choices in the free marketplace, that is the starting point. And I think that comes with a whole bunch of problems, but also assumptions like radical free will. There's almost a libertarian sense that every individual is fully capable of being rational or of at least the possibility of being rational, of thinking critically. But that also comes up immediately to the contradictions not only in the philosophy of free will and whether or not we even have it, but more importantly and more relevant to this subject, the question of marketing. So there seems to be a sort of irrationality inherent in the attempt by companies to artificially create. demand where none would otherwise exist for their ultimately and often superfluous products through the mechanism of marketing, right?

So then you begin to have Coca-Cola ads showing like really fit people on the beach smiling and having fun. And so in this way, you're sort of, I mean, actively trying to create a certain level of irrationality. You're not no longer selling merely this bottle of sugar water, but actually you're selling an idea, a desire for, you know, community, for being at the beach and laughing with your friends. And so in this way, you're sort of kind of displacing the reality of the situation, right? It's a mere commodity that nobody really needs. But because you have billions

of dollars, you can spend a huge, inordinate amounts of money on advertising to people such that you begin to create an artificial demand for a product that nobody really needs in the first place. And then we can get into the whole question of externalization about where those plastic Coca-Cola bottles go, hint, into the ocean, etc. So this whole cascade of problems kind of falls out of this very idea that individuals are the core unit, that they're fundamentally more or less rational and make rational choices in the free marketplace. And then this ostensibly, and this goes back to Adam Smith, that every individual acting rationally in their own self-interest will give rise to a social, communal level of prosperity.

And to some extent, especially compared to feudalism, that's true. But on the other hand, it also creates insane amounts of inequality, of misery, of people actually no longer having the possibility to be rational and effective choosers in the marketplace of ideas. If you are homeless with untreated mental health issues, right, because health care, it costs too much money because somebody wants the profit off of it, you know, you are just simply dispensed by society into the gutters, which then is not, of course, isolated individual who only has to be homeless and reckon with that, but of course there's spillovers to society

at large. So I think like the core problem of focusing on the individual a priori as the core metric unit and the presumption of free will that it comes with, as well as all of the products of starting with only the rational individual, self-interested. individual, I think that creates a whole bunch of downstream problems that are not accounted for within the realm of neoclassical economics. Oh, I completely agree. The, you know, the way that this, I remember this kind of coming up in the economics classes that I've taken, you know, when when someone would start to question the individual's choice as the ultimate cause, right? Or, you know, what causes individuals to make these choices? You know, there's this, you know, from students and

professors alike. I mean, there's this, you know, backdrop of this, like, fear of collectivism, you know, this kind of gray, you know, brutalist, science fiction-y, you know, picture of the Soviet Union, you know, 1984 style. And it's almost as if opening that question, right? What causes individuals to want things, you know, is just total heresy. You can't do it. You know, it's because, you know, the implication in the mind of a neoclassical economist or somebody who really, you know, embraces this way of thinking is that if you start to open up the questions

of, you know, what causes individuals to want things, then you're going to have to confront the reality that people aren't actually free now. And you already have collectivism. You know, we already have, you know, our consumer sovereignty, you know, exactly as you're saying, you know, the marketing aspect is a huge part of it. You know, there's other ways, of course,

that our freedom is, you know, limited and taken from us. And I'm hesitant to say this, so I'm going to put a big disclaimer that I don't know if this number is completely correct now. But a few years ago, I looked up, you know, trying to calculate what percentage of the GDP is spent on marketing. And it came out to be something like 0.8%. Right. So almost 1% of the world, you know, gross domestic products, sorry, the, you know, the total value of goods and services produced in one year, you know, all over the world, it is almost one percent, right? Or it's probably between a half a percent and one percent. You know, why would the capitalist, you know, class spend so much time and so much of their resources on advertising, you know, if it didn't work, right? Or if there was already a genuine need for the product, people needed this product and you're going to provide this already existing.

need, then why would you necessarily need to market it? The product itself is already in demand so you could just make the product and maybe you let people know about it that you're making the product. But in so many instances, if you go turn on your cable television and look at the things being advertised, 98% of them are completely unnecessary bullshit, you know? Right. No, absolutely. And, you know, as soon as you start to question, you know, the unnecessary bullshit, well, you're making a value judgment about somebody else's preferences. you know because we're not collectivists you can't really ask that question you know i see i see that's funny um another question i have um and i don't yeah i don't know um what what your thoughts

are on this and or this is addressed within neoclassical economics itself but the problem of and this might be a problem with capitalist economics writ large but the problem of monopoly formation Because when I talk to neoclassical economists or people in the libertarian or neoliberal vein of things, there's always this sort of idea that the free market has these internal checks and balances, these internal ways of deciding what prices are and dealing, getting out of recessions or creating recessions when, you know, these certain economic conditions take hold. But fundamentally, they'll all talk about and trumpet the best. of free market competition. And you know, you don't want the government getting involved with health care or housing or food or anything else because it interferes with real competition and thus distorts the market. But what I've seen under capitalism, looking back over a couple hundred years of it and looking at America today, is that even if you started from a place of pure

competition, which of course you don't, because some people are born rich and some are poor and for a whole other, you know, slate of reasons. But even hypothetically, if you start from a place, of pure competition, it seems that the moment, and this is built-in logic, the moment one firm starts to defeat its competition and starts rising above it, starts getting more and more of a market share in whatever they're selling or whatever, there's a tendency toward monopoly and there's a sort of irony in the fact that even starting out in a free market competitive system that monopolies develop. And we look around after 40 years of neoliberal, which in a lot of ways is applied neoclassical libertarianism, right?

It's this high suspicion of the state, this handing over to private hands, everything that we possibly can, et cetera. And after 40 or 50 years of that, we have in every industry, you know, shared monopolies or straight up monopolies. And I wonder to what extent neoclassical economics wrestles with this seeming tendency of even free market capitalism to tend toward and ultimately given enough time. result in monopolies. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, this is a, that's a really big question in, in neoclassical economics. And, you know, like you're saying, you know, it's a real problem

because that's exactly where competition leads, you know, even if you set up the competition to be, you know, as pure and perfect and, you know, fair and all that as possible, then, yeah, you end up with monopolies, right? And, I mean, I would highly recommend, of course, volume one capital you know especially toward the end marks you know really lays that out before you know a lot of these trends happen um but i guess one one question would be is there a certain neoclassical economist who would bite the bullet and say okay maybe we do need the government to step in and and do trust busting once in a while and we'll allow for that do do some do some bite the bullet in that way most definitely yeah and you yeah you'll have uh yeah the trust busting thing um you know the economist

could, could recommend this, you know, and probably a lot of economists have actually made their whole careers off of writing trust-busting policies or recommending, you know, that the monopolies get broken up. And there's a few, you know, who do that. Obviously, those policies very rarely actually get into place, although if you're an economist, you can make a career, you know, off of that. You know, so on the one side of the debate, you know, kind of the anti-monopoly, you know, the neoclassicals, you know they would they would recommend this and uh this goes along with the the libertarian trend right but very neoclassical trend that these monopolies are actually the results of the government right um and so there's some kind of you know external force especially the government right uh because i can point to this law and

you know the government you know granted this merger and you know the uh you know this barrier you know to competition, right? The government created this subsidy or whatever, yeah. Exactly, yeah, the subsidy, right. And so it's the government's fault, right? If we didn't have the government involved with this,

then there would be natural, perfect competition, right? And the monopolies will get, you know, broken up, you know, by that process. Kind of a second version of that story is a neoclassical economist will say, yes, there's monopolies,

monopolies, but you forgot about the dimension of time. And actually, if we look over time, you can see that all the monopolies that you just listed, you know, eventually they're going to be replaced by another business, right? So if we think in four dimensions, there's actually not monopolies. Because if you go back years, there isn't any other companies? Clever, slimy. Very slimy. Yeah.

And it really makes sense, you know, in this mindset. I mean, eventually on a long enough time scale, an asteroid will hit and destroy the monopolies. There's another problem that I see here, though, with the monopoly question is, of course, with any government, but especially a minimal libertarian government, that the monopolist simply, and this historically has been bared out, will just buy the politicians, such that even if you would wreck, even if you're a neoclassical economist who says, well, I do believe the government should be able to step in at this point in trust bust, you know, in actual real. world real politic practice what happens is the monopolist simply buy off the politicians and almost become the shadow state and we certainly see that in today the two political parties their donor classes i mean they're you know even if some politicians will rhetorically um you know gesture towards the need to trust bust nobody ever does it nobody seriously tries to advance of that cause because enough politicians are bought off by the monopolists to prevent that

And then I would also argue that a long libertarian tradition of blaming the government, government in and of itself for the failures of capitalism seems to exist here because, you know, I'm sure there are many examples that one could point out of government propped up monopolies or government policy leading to monopolies. But I would 100% argue, like if we had an anarcho-capitalist, you know, system where there was no government interference in the market whatsoever, It's just logical and almost beyond question that monopolies would absolutely form, you know, even outside of the influence of any government policy trying to tilt the scales one way or the other. And so I think that that is ultimately a pretty disingenuous argument by libertarians, but it's also what they always do. When you kind of pin them in a corner about how capitalism is doing shit that ostensibly goes against their core beliefs, they will find a way to blame it on government writ large and to. take the blame off of capitalism or the economic system as a whole. Absolutely. It's a it's the same logic. You know, with the classical economics, you know, because maintaining this, this dualism between the market and the government, you know, by itself kind of implies that there's, you know,

economic things that the government also does, right? And economic things that the market does. And since there's no, well, first off, there's no, you know, existing capitalists, economy in history that has existed without a government, right? And secondly, because there's not very many serious economists who, you know, propose that we get rid of the government entirely. You know, that just becomes that kind of sneaky, you know, maneuver. And, you know, the eternal debate here with the businesses buying out the government, right, now you can have economists write policies that say that businesses can no longer donate money. Right. And this is, you know, something, you know, to the political parties, right? That, of course, runs up against the, you know, commitment to freedom. Right. And individualism, you know, people should be able to spend the money, you know, and businesses are effectively people in this, you know, theory. Or they behave exactly like individuals, like a rational individual. And yeah, I think that's, that's another symptom of this like insidiousness is that any group of people.

people, like any class, any, you know, business, any government, um, you know, through the lens of neoclassical economics behaves exactly like an individual, right? So we just have these groups of individuals who are like interacting with each other. Um, you know, the monopoly is maybe just kind of the, the greedy kid, right? Who, uh, you know, brings their toys to the playground. and then you know you got to figure out how to redistribute the toys or you know and it's like uh but one more thing i think it might be useful to mention here too so some people have made well i'll just say there's a difference between economics uh as the study of the economy and the business school right so a lot of these debates like the monopoly question and a lot of these you know other debates have become

You know, unsolvable, you know, it's obvious to other people that these debates have not been solved by the economists. And so about 40 or 50 years ago, or maybe a little longer, you had the separation of the field of economics into, you know, economics, which is today, right, the ideology that naturalizes capitalism and, you know, it gives us these perfect reference points. and separating that from the business school, right? The business school actually teaches you how the economy actually works, right? Especially if you're a capitalist. And, you know, the business school is going to have more, you know, pragmatic, right?

Practical solutions to these questions, which, you know, at the end of the day, you know, end up doing what the system wants, right? The system, you know, produces monopoly. So we're going to justify that, right? You know, on the other side of that monopoly debate, a lot of economists and probably even more business people, although I'm not a business degree person, they'll say that the monopoly is actually more efficient, right? And it actually makes sense. You know, the one term is the natural monopoly, right? So your utilities, right, the electricity in your house is a natural monopoly because it really just makes sense to have one business doing that. You know, otherwise we're going to, you know, have a lot of redundant, you know, electrical wires and whatnot. And in those cases, I mean, that argument is also very popular, you know, and if you push, you know, an economist, you know, far enough,

then they might even admit that to you, right? Monopoly or oligopoly, right, a small number of monopolists who control the market, like most markets are actually oligopolis, right, instead of monopolies. But those are actually more efficient because they can produce so many, you know, units of a commodity that their, you know, their price of production is going to be a lot lower than if you had, you know, a hundred different companies, you know, producing cars or whatever. So, yeah, the insidiousness here, right, we can, you know, kind of take up any sides of the debate, you know, part of why I think neoclassical economics has been able to remain dominant as the number one theory is that it's also this theory of everything, right?

Right. When you take up the individual as the ultimate cause, then you can kind of, you know, spin any story that you want to tell or a story that you need to tell or you think you need to tell. Right. You know, at an extreme example, we could take this, you know, individualist market logic and apply it to like marriage, right? And economists have done that. They've, you know, produced the individualist theory of marriage. It's like, well, you marry people who are, you know, going to help you maximize your, you know, household income, right? And that explains marriage. or you know the neoclassical theory that market competition in the labor market is going to eliminate racial discrimination in hiring practices right because the the capitalists the employers are incentivized to hire the most productive workers regardless of their you know race and so over time you know capitalists are going to be rewarded they're going to get more profits because the incentives right if they have hire the best workers, regardless of their race. And so over time, racism is going to decrease, which, as we know, is not really worked out like that in either case. I mean, the theory of intimate relationships, I think is kind of freaky. Yeah, I've certainly, I've had libertarians argue that, like, you know, they're against, like, you know, desegregation and these top-down laws to try to prevent racism, not because they're racist, but because they think it's government. meddling and that the free market, for those reasons you just mentioned, would solve racism by itself. Therefore, we don't need, like, you know, laws of governing, you know, affirmative action or anything else. So it really goes off the rails pretty quickly, as you can see. But one thing that you mentioned is these oligopolis, you know, we talk about monopolies, but it's

relatively rare that one single firm dominates an entire market. It's usually, and if you look in the American economy today, it's very much like this. It's a very much like this. It's a a handful of them. And there's an argument that you were that you were sort of saying from the neoclassical position that there's actually some effectiveness in these oligopolis. You know, in the utility case, it makes perfect sense why you wouldn't want to have a hundred different utility companies competing and trying to wire up neighborhoods and shit like that. But in other areas, it gets a little weirder, like around medicine, for example, there's an oligopoly in the pharmaceutical industry in the United States. And what that produces is not

lower prices for consumers or even necessarily more effective sort of market transactions, but it produces cartels or at certain times, which has been proven, and you can find many articles over the years where they get caught doing this conspiring behind the scenes. So if you have three sort of huge firms with no competition in a market, at some point, the three top CEOs will say, hey, let's get in a room together. it's actually stupid for us to compete and drive prices down, right? Why don't we sort of work together behind the scenes and set prices at a high level so that we can all make more profit? And I think that flies in the face of the neoclassical argument of these things being actually more effective in some way, right?

Undoubtedly, maybe one of the, a very recent example of that is that Uber just started making profit finally. Apparently it's posted losses. It's lost money every single year since it came out. And the reason why now, I think it's this last quarter or whatever, you know, recently the last three months or something, Uber's been able to make a profit is because they decimated the taxi cab competition, right? They were kind of selling their products at an artificially low price and they kept getting investors to dump money in for like 10 years. And now, because they've, you know, they've leveled their competition, now they can raise prices, right? And so that was very much their conscious strategy, you know, all these people, there's a saying that, you know, once you get high enough up in the capitalist and the ruling classes, you find a bunch of Marxists, right, or class theorists who, you know, know what they're doing. Yeah, very class conscious.

Yeah, they're way more class conscious, yeah. Yeah, and organized. all right well let's go ahead and move forward i know i've only asked two questions on the outline and we're an hour in but i like following up on some of those things because it kind helps bring some of the you know sort of more inaccessible and jargony language which you're doing a great job explaining of course but it kind of brings it down to earth and caches it out in ways that like the normal person can understand like you know they might not be able to understand certain you know textbooks terms or anything but they understand like facebook and

Amazon and Google are more or less shared monopolies, right? So I kind of wanted to highlight that. But my next question for you, and continuing on in this discussion of neoclassical economics, now that we have a fairly good grasp on what exactly it is, it is the dominant strain within economics in the West. I think it's fair to say, if not even more broadly than that, but certainly in the West, definitely in America. So my question is, why and how has neoclassical economics been able to remain dominant? despite getting a lot wrong about the economy, right? How did we get here?

Right on. That's a big question. I think I have a very partial answer. I kind of want to say there's three features of neoclassical economics that have enabled it to do that. All right. So, you know, in no particular order of importance, you know, in the alternative economics class and economics for emancipation, you know, we kind of get into this. And the other question's a bit more right, right? Because that's the point of the classes.

But okay. The first reason is, you know, kind of simply, materially, that the capitalist class, you know, or the system, really, the capitalist system chose neoclassical economics from other competing economic theories. So to go back to like 1890, you know, the, the, the, the, the, marginalist economists, the early neoclassicals, some of them were actually socialists. And, you know, their innovation of reducing price to value, you know, as it was being created, was not, you know, automatically reactionary at the time, right? And, yeah, some of the most famous, you know,

marginalists who appear in the textbooks today were socialists, you know, not the majority here, but over time, the theory, the neoclassical theory, as it came together, it presented or it proved to the capitalist class or to the system that it could fulfill those same ideological functions that classical economics did as well, right? And of course, classical economics picked up from medieval Christianity in European feudalism, right?

There's, you know, every class society, you know, has like an ideological, you know, a system of justification, which makes the system invisible. It, you know, confuses the causes of its problems. And it even does provide, you know, some answers to real problems, right? So the theory, the neoclassical economics, did all those things, right? It makes it, you know, difficult or impossible to, you know, think about how to change the system or to even see it. But it also provides, you know, some answers.

To take an example, you might be skeptical. at this point in the episode that, you know, neoclassical economics can provide any answers. But, you know, a recent one is the solution to inflation is to raise interest rates. So, the neoclassical theory

is saying, you know, we understand inflation, you know, which they don't. You know, in my opinion, they don't. It's a very complicated thing. You know, price is rising over time, which is what inflation is. So they offer this solution. that, you know, we're going to raise the interest rates of every, you know, every interest

rate, your house loan, your car loan, your student loans, you know, everything. And by doing that, we're going to decrease the, you know, number of consumers who are spending money on stuff, right, or the number of stuff that people buy is going to go down because it's more expensive now to buy money, right, to borrow money. And so, you have some of these, like, kind of partial, you know, answers. They go some distance, you know, they never, ever solve the problem of inflation. They never solve the problem of unemployment, you know, whatever, but there's something there. Okay.

So because this particular, you know, economic theory or this collection of ideas was able to do these functions, then the system has rewarded it by investing in its material production, right? Neoclassical economists get paid. Marxist economists don't even get hired, right? And sometimes you hire a Keynesian economist or a feminist economist, you know, just to have one around, right? But the surplus goes to the neoclassical, right? Which means that's where your textbooks get funded, right? That's, you know, you have to be a neoclassical economist by, you know,

1945 if you want to work in a think tank, right? And maybe you should be familiar with Keynesian theory, you know, But, you know, economics departments funding, right? The Department of Defense, I meant to do more research on this, right? But all the ways that the CIA and the government, you know, have invested in this. You know, so reason number one is neoclassical economics can fulfill those ideological functions, and it got rewarded, right? It got chosen by the system, and so it's propped up, right? Absolutely.

Well, let's pause right there. That's a great point. It provides the ideological superstructure, and it, of capitalism, right? It gives it this naturalizes it in the same way that, you know, in medieval Europe, perhaps the church and its priests would naturalize and deify the monarchical feudal system, right? This is the divine right. These kings are chosen by God to rule. Therefore, you know, this is the justification for why things are as they are. In present capitalist post-enlightenment modernity, the economists and these economic departments in capitalist powerhouse. houses serve a similar function to give the ideology of capitalism, which is presumed by neoclassical economics, right? Capitalism is taken for granted as the system by which neoclassical economics then begins to make sense of, but it's not ever attempting or even wanting to actually challenge that at any level. The economists in this way serve as the new

priests, right? They are what the priests were to monarchies, the modern-day neoclassical economist is to capitalism. And I just wanted to give people the option if they're interested in hearing more about this. We did an episode several years ago with another economist. The episode was called Capitalist Chaos and Crimes, the Great Recession of 2008, in which we specifically talk about, and I think I even play a part from a documentary where they talk exactly about this, where the Ivy League economics departments are highly, highly funded. And it was the economist coming out of these highly funded programs that guided the not only the I mean you know gave gave excuses for why this whole thing happened and then served to sort of naturalize things like you know

the boom and bus cycle the great recession what happened etc so if you want to if you want to dive a little bit deeper into how economists and economic departments like you know like a larry summers for example comes out of i believe Harvard and has had has you know was huge in the obama administration, for example, during the, or after the Great Recession, trying to deal with it. And Larry Summers' ideas and the ostensible prestige and scientific veneer that were represented in his person were very influential in how the Obama administration and how America at large dealt with that crisis, which was, from the working classes perspective, incredibly limited and even poor. So I just want to give people the option to go listen to that after this

episode if they want to hear a little bit more about that. But I do fundamentally just want to reiterate that idea that, you know, it serves a function. And so, of course, they're going to be very highly funded and, you know, dissident economists, Marxist economists, people that challenge the basic premises of neoclassical economics are not going to be funded. And maybe, as you said, one or two exist within a department. But if that department is hegemonically committed to some version of neoclassical economics, it can afford to have one or two dissidents, you know, that are sort of amusing, but also give it credibility. Like, you know, we're not just, you know, propagandists or whatever. We have these other people who think differently in our department as well, right? It gives

them a little bit of cover. Exactly. And, you know, one metric or, you know, one way to see this is, you know, there's thousands of economics departments in the United States. But there's somewhere between five and 10 that actually have, you know, like a real presence of the other theories, you know, and to, you know, take a risk by listing them off real quick, because I'm sure I'm leaving some out. There's UMass Amherst, there's Colorado State University, there's, I believe, Colorado College, oh, goodness, I probably got the name wrong. There's University of Missouri in Kansas City. there's the new school which is very expensive

and then there's John Jay College those are kind of the colleges I'm aware of that have you know a serious you know more than just like one or two people the departments themselves are dissident in a way exactly I see yeah and you know in the case of UMass

you know intentionally or not our department is not on the official rankings and I think that's true of a lot of these other you know kind of radical departments yeah they're just not prestigious, you know, they're not, you know, and of course, like, you know, Larry Summers' expertise, you know, hiding behind this, like, scientific debar, you know, it's mostly confidence, right? Because the economists get things wrong, you know, so much. So much. So much. I see that, like, every time, like 50, you know, the weather person is old. You know, we're accurate. You can flip a fucking coin, yeah. Right. Yeah. Get out of the dartboard. What's the inflation rate going to be this year?

All right, so the first one is ideological function. I'm sorry to take you too far afield. No, no, all good. That's perfect. Yeah, so, yeah, ideologically, boom, it, you know, it does these jobs. I think the second reason that I kind of have here goes really good into your point, right? You know, so it does these functions, but also it appears, you know, neoclassical economics, like you're saying, it has the scientific veneer, right? it appears to be objective truth, right, scientific, or as the economists like to say, value neutral, right?

Yeah. No matter your morality, your ethics, your values, you know, whatever your individual choices about these questions are, it doesn't matter because this is the price and this is the quantity, right? Because this is the optimal outcome, you know, of maximizing everybody's welfare, right? is objectively true. How do they do that, right? If, you know, it's not really science, you know, the way that they do this is by taking the results of other sciences that don't study the economy, and honestly, mostly don't even study human society, and they just, you know, take those tools and those results, and they kind of plug it in to this, you know, story about the economy. Economics is famous for being mathematical.

And, like, the joke is if you, you know, go get a degree, like, especially, like, a master's or a Ph.D. in economics, it's basically like getting a higher degree in math, right? Or maybe physics, you know. But, you know, that, and that's true. I mean, even at UMass, I've had to do way more math than I've ever wanted to do. You know, all this, like, equations and da, da, da, da, da, and proofs, you know, logic and stuff. So neoclassical economics gets its scientific veneer from, from, you know, those tools taken from math, physics, biology, and it kind of constructs its own standard of truth. So one standard of truth is efficiency, right? The economy is doing good when it's efficient, right? When we get the most output for the most input of resources, right? We use the fewest, you know, gallons of oil to produce cars, right? or whatever. And so that standard efficiency is not really efficiency in general, right? We're

never talking with neoclassical theory. We're never talking about freedom in general. We're never talking about value in general or efficiency or welfare. We're talking about a very specific definition of efficiency. And that definition comes from mathematics. And it actually comes from, you know, calculus and optimization. Right? It's, uh, you draw the curve. And, and you say, how do we figure out what the highest point on the curve is or, you know, that kind of thing, right? And so the results, right, the logic,

it's scientific, but it's not scientific about the economy. It's scientific about numbers, right? And we just kind of plugged in all the unknowns and the gaps, you know, into this picture. And we just use the proofs and the experiments and the logic, you know, really to do this,

that sneaky maneuver of jumping, from the assumption to the conclusion, right? So people accuse economists that you're just assuming what you're supposed to be proving. Well, yeah, that's how it's set up. And, you know, to make the jump from assumption to the proof, they pull in, you know, the science and the math, or the physics and the math, you know, the methods,

the optimization function, the, you know, linear algebra, whatever. And that's how they get to the conclusion, which we actually already started with the set of assumptions. And at the same time, you know, part of this scientific veneer is if you're not doing that procedure, if you're not using, you know, the front bond parent boss theorem, I don't know that one, you know, if we're not using the optimization function or you're not using, you know, matrix algebra or, you know, whatever, then you're not actually doing economics, right? We're talking about something else that we don't actually recognize the scientific.

and, you know, maybe that's sociology, or maybe that's history or, oh, maybe you're just a philosopher, right? You know, but that's a lot of equal. Yeah. And, you know, this comes back to a thing I know has been said on this show a bunch, right? You know, those who say they are not ideological are actually the most ideological, right? Because we never get back to questioning, you know, what is this definition of efficiency? You know, if you start to ask those questions, then you're just, you know, forcing me to accept. your value judgments and you're an evil collectivist.

Yeah, absolutely. So I just want us to have two quick points. I say, one, this is why you need philosophy. I think it, you know, not that philosophers are widely respected with an academia, but philosophy does keep other fields sort of in check. I know, like Neil deGrasse Tyson will often say, like it comes out of entirely out of STEM, like, oh, we don't need philosophy anymore. We have science.

And then he'll go on to say some insane fucking. presumptive thing that a 101 philosophy class would have corrected in him. And it just kind of proves the point that he doesn't know what he's talking about. But I think that's also obviously true in economics because, you know, just this conversation already, I'm by no means a philosopher, but I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy. I kind of have that orientation in my mind. And the first thing I do is start going to bedrock assumptions and fundamental premises. And that is very inconvenient for the neoclassical economist. So that's why we need philosophy, folks. But the second thing I wanted to say is that whenever I hear an economist say the words value neutral, I reach for my gun because there is nothing neutral about neoclassical or capitalist economics whatsoever.

And they have very value-laden outcomes, right? Very moral outcomes, immoral outcomes. And so I think like to try to set aside any sort of value orientation or any sort of bedrock moral. value system is very convenient for a system that is amoral at best and often immoral impractive. Absolutely. I could not agree more. I think one other symptom of this that I was just thinking of as you were saying that is that, and this has become more true over time, most economics departments don't have a history of economic thought class. It's not a requirement, right? It just doesn't matter, right, to just, you know, learn how we got here, right? What were these, you know, philosophical questions 100, 150 years ago that actually were kind of being discussed, right, as neoclassics formed. But, no, there's a... Yeah, like, Adam Smith, Adam Smith is, you know, an economist and also a literal moral philosopher. And a lot of his, a lot of his moral writings actually fly in the face of a lot of neoclassical, you know, economic conclusions. So it's, it's obviously, again, very can be.

convenient to to kind of sidestep that, but it's very unfair when the father of modern economics also was a moral philosopher. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Real quick, I think too, I don't know, Adam Smith's, you know, one of his, what's considered to be like his key ideas, maybe you've all heard this quote, you know, the benevolence of the butcher comes from their self-interest, right? that everybody, you know, acts, you know, selfishly, and at the end of the day, everybody's, you know, more wealthy. That comes from, like, one paragraph, right, or just a few sentences from Adam Smith's, you know, book, The Wealth of Nations. And, yeah, if you go look in, like, theory, moral sentiments is his first book, I just agree, I completely. You know, you find all sorts of things.

But, you know, the neoclassical economists really needed that one paragraph, right? All right, so just to catch you back up, we have the ideological function. that neoclassical economic serves under the dominant reign of capitalism, and that's why it's funded and prioritized. And then we have the scientific appearance, right, using tools from other sciences, the mathematical equations, etc., giving it this veneer of objectivity, you know, terms like value neutral or these attempts to push out any concerns outside of this strictly objective analysis of how things actually are, which, as we've been talking about, is bullshit in many ways. So that's one and two. And what's the third way? So the third way on my list, you know, and of course there's probably a fourth and a fifth of the six. Neoclassical economics is a theory of everything.

I think I mentioned this earlier. You can use that, you know, that three-part schema, you know, preferences, technology, and resources. You can use that to tell, you know, something, you know, to say some kind of story about pretty much anything. in the economy, right? And so even if the explanations don't really make sense, you know, that's how we have room for debate. And the important part is not, you know, resolving any of these questions. You know, that's not really what this is about.

You know, the important part here is that you can produce an explanation, right? So it is a very powerful theory in that you can construct a lot of arguments out of its, its concepts out of its initial entry point concepts, the fundamental determining, you know, most powerful things, you know, especially human choice. And, you know, the further that we get away from those, you know, initial entry points and the less sense that, you know, economists, that neoclassical economists make, you just fill in the gaps with confidence, right? Or you could, you know, bring in some kind of, you know, novel innovation from another field. In recent years, the one, you know, popular neoclassical trend is called behavioral economics.

And behavioral economics takes, you know, a lot of like psychology type research on, you know, what people actually do. You know, are people actually selfish? And it applies that to neoclassical theory, you know, so it's like, oh, okay, well, people aren't actually selfish all the time, you know, but it doesn't matter because we can use selfishness. as this, you know, important, you know, this, this, uh, this, uh, kind of standard of perfection that we can try to get to, you know, because everyone would agree, it's good to be rational, right? And so, you know, you have this theory of everything. And, uh, and I don't even mean to say that all the explanations that are produced in neoclassical economics, like benefit the ruling class, or, you know, they do. Um, but they're, they're not all for just the capitalists, right?

regular working people, you know, and economics professors and capitalists, but, you know, normal people can make some sense of their economic reality using neoclassical theory, right? So neoclassical economics, you know, says that you're, you know, you're poor, right? You're poor because, you know, you don't have the right resources or you don't, you know, you have too much constraints, you know, or you're making bad choices, right? a lot of people can take that right and they can see it in their daily lives you know oh my co-worker you know they work really hard they make these good you know choices and they get rewarded you know and they move up you know and but me you know i you know i don't right so you know in that particular

you know case the blame is of course shifted you know back to the worker but that's how you end up you know if if you're you're confining your whole you know your site your theoretical uh perspective to always starting with the individual and the individual's choices, then you can, you know, keep talking bullshit, you know, all day. You know, and to combine that with the first two reasons, the surplus, you know, the system will pay you to, you know, talk neoclassical bullshit and to tell more stories, right, and to make these things up.

And, you know, the second point, you know, the scientific veneer, you can just keep pulling in, you know, the results of other sciences. and, you know, adding to the discussion, right? There's this really beautiful phrase, I don't know where it came from. I want to say Al Thasur, but probably not. Maybe Yaya Madra, which is unity within dispersion. So neoclassical theory is unified because there are these debates.

And because, you know, we're not trying to find the ultimate, you know, truth or, you know, they think they are, but they're never going to get there, right? We can just keep having these discussions and these debates. and produce new stories and just keep talking, you know, forever and ever. And I think this kind of comes back to part of why, you know, the capitalist social formation decided to separate the economists from the business school, right? Because they really did need, you know, someone to produce good answers, you know, while this, you know, all this other storytelling is going on.

Yeah. So that's kind of, yeah, I guess that's my understanding of how neoclassical economics has become dominant. you know there's also a momentum effect um i teach undergraduates you know like 18 19 you know year olds maybe some 20 year olds but i mostly do the introduction class so by the time my students get to college they have already heard most of what i'm going to tell them you know it is their intuition right um you know supply and demand makes sense you know you ask an economy you know an economics major why did you pick economics often they'll say well that's how i think you know and i thought it was cool because they you know think how i do you know and i want to get paid i want to make 150k you know

being a position so um so yeah that's kind of my my feel for that right i mean you know i think the analogy with medieval christianity and the the the priest you know the priest class um is really powerful right but uh neoclassical economics does have the scientific veneer um and it is a really powerful theory you know it's it's not just um you know some kind of like you know bottom shelf like you know ideology you know fantasy fairy tale it's actually a very developed theory and you can use it to talk about anything you know not very well you know but uh you can so yeah yeah absolutely it does it does have certain answers and again if you don't probe the the underlying assumptions or premises it does make a certain amount of sense if if you look around you at capitalism and you

more or less sort of intuit that as a natural state of things, and neoclassical economics will make a lot of sense. But if you come to this stuff with an already skeptical eye towards capitalism altogether, or in the Marxist tradition, you see it as this historically contingent phenomenon, you understand basic base and superstructure analysis, et cetera. You really can approach this from a whole different angle that immediately creates a lot of skepticism, which is obviously in this case incredibly healthy your point about unity within dispersion is is really interesting i like that a lot is like yeah there's all these different ostensible debates there's all these different um narratives there's there's a disagreement between various neoclassical

economists right and so this is this seeming dispersion that is actually um sort of hiding or concealing a much broader unity and like it kind of reminds me of that noem chomsky quote about Democrats and Republicans where it's like there's very vociferous debate, but it's within a pretty narrow spectrum. And so you get the illusion of like, oh, these people really disagree on basic fundamental issues, right? And that gives you this idea that this democracy that they're the face of makes sense and really does work because these people are arguing and they have different ideas. And even within parties, there's different factions and people disagree. But, you know, fundamentally when it comes to empire, when it comes to capitalism, when it comes to patting the pockets of the

donor classes, there's deep, deep unity. And that ostensible dispersion of thought and disagreement and conflict actually kind of conceals a much broader bipartisan consensus. Absolutely. Are you on the market side or are you on the government side? Right. Right. Exactly. All right. Well, let me let's go ahead and move forward because now that we have a lot of this basic introduction to these concepts, I hear that you're developing an online economics 101 course kind of in the vein that we've been talking about so far, where you actually do challenge some of these premises and these foundations and you come at it from a skeptical angle. Can you, can you kind of talk about this, this whole project? Absolutely. So CPE has worked with two other

organizations to kind of produce two options, right? So the course that we've kind of finished developing is an alternative, you know, a radical, you know, introduction to radical Econ 101 that is for activists, right? So you don't have to be in college. You know, maybe it's better if you're not in college for this one. And the name of that course, which a lot of it came from the curriculum that CPE has been teaching at our Summer Institute since 1979. So that curriculum we've developed with the Center for Economic Democracy. And the name of that course is called Economics for Emancipation. And so that course, you know, for activists, it has seven modules.

It is completely available online for free. Yeah, we'll have the link in the show notes. But that course, the full name is Economics for Emancipation, a course on capitalism, solidarity, and how we get free. The seven modules are, you know, the economy and the working day, how capitalism works, the redistribution and recognition paradox, alternative economic systems, which we do a four-part, you know, four different kinds of socialism. The fifth module is the history of the United States economic system. The sixth module is on fiscal versus monetary policy. So fiscal policy is when the government spends money And monetary policy is when the government changes the money supply, right?

Manipulating interest rates or printing money, right, that kind of thing. And then the seventh module is called Building the Alternative Solidarity Economy. And like I said, this is completely free. You can download all the modules. You could go through this course with your organization. organization. It includes a train the trainer's component. So everybody who takes the course in, you know, you or your organization, if you haven't taken the course yet, then there's materials in there for, you know, learning how to put on the training. And this economics for

emancipation is very much a participatory, very much influenced by like Paolo Frere and others, you know, and it has a lot of popular education, you know, pedagogies, that go into practice there. So, yeah, you can download the whole thing for free. I think we, you know, the CED requests like your email, you know, and your name and stuff, but that's it. You know, it's completely free. You just download it.

It's got everything, you know, there that you need. So that's, of course, it was released a few months ago online, and it's been downloaded a bunch of times. I've heard of several organizations who have put it on, you know, successfully. And, yeah, it's kind of, it's a condensed version of, the CPE curriculum. Nice. That's one resource I'd highly recommend checking out.

So really quick, just to double down on that. Highly recommend completely free. Even, you know, this is specifically made for people that are not even in college. This is for activists, for organizers. If you are organizing within a big organization, a national organization, or you have a small local organization, or a chapter of an organization, and you have relative autonomy, this would be a great, way to help educate your cadre and your members on basic economics from a very informed economic perspective. That is also inherently socialist that will include the skepticism toward the dominant forms of economic analysis and provide you alternatives. So that can be

incredibly helpful for any sort of socialist, communist, communist, Marxist, even anarchist organization that wants to educate its members on basic economic truths and reality. So you can have a working, understanding, and relationship with dominant and dissident economic theories and forms of thought. So I really just can't emphasize how important that is and how that is deeply beneficial in the context of an organizing chapter or an organization in general. So I just wanted to put an exclamation point at the end of that. But go ahead, Will. Right. Thank you for those kind words. And yeah, you know, it is, this course is the crystallization of decades, you know,

and the thousands of activists have gone through this training. Beautiful. So that one's, you know, pretty sturdy. And that project's been around. The second course or the second alternative economics course that we've been working on has been a lot more recent. And we're going to put it on for the first time with rethinking economics, which is the main organization, you know, producing this.

But that course, it is. Rethink Econ 101 The Rethinking Econ 101 course is a syllabus or it's a course that we've been developing We have the syllabus It's going to do several things Throughout the semester

You know over a 10 week You know course It's kind of built to be like a regular college class And in the long you know The medium to long term The goal is to get this class To start replacing Economics 101, you know

neoclassical econ classes across the United States. And so briefly, you know, what this course is going to do is the first few weeks we're going to do what we're calling like building a meta understanding of the discipline, right, of neoclassical theory. You know, so, you know, this is what neoclassical economics is, probably a little bit more developed form than, you know, what we were talking about earlier in this episode. and we're going to go through several myths, right? We call it like myth busting. So, you know, for example, the myth of market fundamentalism, right? Markets are the most efficient, right? They're the best way to organize the economy.

We're going to go into, you know, myths like that to, you know, show kind of how they're wrong or really, you know, to give the people taking the class responses, right, to, you know, economics, or they talk with an economist or, you know, their professor, their economics professor. So the first part, we're going to, you know, define and then kind of critique, you know, neoclassical economics, right? Especially showing how it's, you know, how it's wrong, you know, in practice, you know, it's shortcomings that way. In the middle section, we're going to do a brief introductions to various alternative economic theories. Some of the theories that we're going to be discussing are Marxian economics. Of course, you've got how capitalism is a system.

We're going to discuss Keynesian economics, which, you know, was a major challenge to deal classical economics and actually kind of displaced it and became the dominant economic theory for a couple decades after World War II. right so we're going to look at you that's the new deal period from fDR's new deal through regan's neoliberalism canesianism was dominant and the neoclassical reemerged during the 80s exactly yeah exactly perfect yeah and um oh and i don't know this is uh real quick i should say um you know when when we've been going through it and picking these alternative theories um right uh which you know, people in this, in the radical economics kind of sphere, we call it heterodox economics, right? So heterodox economics is all the theories that are not the orthodox, right? Not the neoclassical approach. So of course Marxism, you know, is in there. But, and these other theories are too, but it is difficult to define heterodox economics, right? The definition is like a, a moving boundary line because, you know, any of the challenges that these alternative theories, you know, presents, you know, they tend to get recaptured over time, right? Neoclassical economics responds. So for Keynesian economics, which basically says, you know, capitalism is unstable, right? It's good, but it's unstable. And, you know, for this reason and this reason, you know, fundamental uncertainty, you know, the investors are going to make.

the wrong decisions about how much, you know, money to invest. And so the solution for that is government intervention, right, in restoring the confidence of the investors. So, you know, that theory, the Keynesian theory, you know, got absorbed back into neoclassical theory, right? Just like a lot of these. A lot of Marxists have actually been reabsorbed back into, you know, neoclassical economics. So I just wanted to make that point, right? It's really challenging to even draw the line of, you know, what counts as heterodox. You know, it's hard to escape, you know, neoclassical thinking because it is so dominant, right? And we've all been materially inundated, you know, with that way of thinking. Yeah, and I would say during, during COVID,

for example, that was a great example of like a dominant neoclassical co-opting elements of Keynesianism, like the stimulus checks that were put out by under Trump and Biden are in some sense, a sort of Keynesian response, trying to make sure people are okay during this period of crisis by employing the state's power to intervene in the free market. But also, it's coming along with a lot of neoclassical ideas about, you know, certain people need to get back to work, right? We call them heroes, but we won't increase their wages. We won't give them benefits. Then the pandemic ends. There's like, you know, a bunch of tumult in the economy. Then there's a new challenge do businesses raise wages to get workers back, you know, after the pandemic

severed a lot of workers from their jobs. A lot of the solution by, you know, certain firms was to reintroduce child labor instead of paying higher wages to adults to come back, right? So there's this sort of a blend of a certain amount of Keynesianism during the crisis, as well as a lot of neoclassical logic structuring the entire thing, right? Absolutely agree. And I think you I remember reading one of those announcements in the Wall Street Journal. It's like, you know, Biden unleashes Keynesian economic policy. I was like, whoa. But I'm sorry to interrupt, yeah.

Right? Yeah. No, no, that's right. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so we'll look at Marxian economics, Keynesian economics, what's kind of called old institutionalist economics, very similar to Keynesian theory, except the basic unit of analysis is not investors or anything like that,

but it's like groups, right? It's institutions. You know, they can be formal and formal, right? Da, da, da. And institutional economics is really, really interesting for kind of periodizing, you know, certain moments in history. You know, like Fordism, post-Fortism, you know, how. consumerism, status management versus neoliberalism, right? Embeddedness. So that'll be the institutional economics part. A few other theories we're looking at is feminist economics, which kind of takes

at its entry point the reproduction of society and power relations within the division of labor, right? So feminist economics tends to, you know, really obliterate this distinction between market versus non-market, right, pointing out there's all this labor that's done in society that is not, you know, even accounted for in the market, right? So how could that even count as economics from neoclassical perspective, right? And, you know, feminists, you know, talk a lot about, you know, patriarchy as a system that kind of, you know, co-constitutes capitalism, right? Reproductive labor, care labor, you know, those kinds of things. theory, and maybe I shouldn't give too much away. I'm trying to tease the audience to get you to sign up for this class, right? I know it's interesting. All right on, yeah. So another theory we're going to look at is ecological economics, which, you know, takes as its entry point, this situation of the economy within nature, right? The relation between the economy and, you know, everything else that's alive on the world. A lot of ecological economics tends to be very Keynesian and instant. institutional. They develop this concept from Keynes about fundamental uncertainty, right? We can never really have enough information to know, you know, what the best economic outcome is or what's most efficient. And so they take that idea and extend it to climate change, you know. And it's this thing called the precautionary principle, right? So, you know, we have a pretty small percentage or we have a pretty high percentage, you know. chance that if we keep doing what we're doing, then everything is going to die. Right. The precautionary principle, you know, just logically suggests that we should, you know, take precautions right away. You know, another part of that is what's called donut economics. A lot of critiques of growth as a goal, right? As we know, you know, from the Marx's perspective, right? Growth and profit, you know, is the driving force of capitalism, right? Um, so ecological economists, you know, question that. They, uh, you know, uh, theorized that we could, you know, even have, you know, negative growth. We could degrow the economy, right? Um, and, uh, the last kind of group of, uh, heterodox theories that we're going to look at is the decolonial, uh, or like the anti-imperialist, right? So, um, the world economic system, right? The division between, uh, the rich countries and the poor countries, right? The center. versus the periphery.

So some of their contributions, right, periphery and center, metropolis and satellite, right, what's called the first and third world. And this concept of unequal exchange. So when, you know, the global north and the global south, right, the center and the periphery or the rich and the poor countries trade with each other,

then through, you know, various, you know, manipulations of prices, value and labor, you know, surplus value is extracted out of the periphery into the, into the core, right? And to go along with that, the periphery countries are underdeveloped, right? So we talk about developed and developing countries, right? The United States has already developed, you know, but India is still developing, right, or whatever. Or I think about Walter Rodney's, you know, how Europe underdeveloped Africa, for example. Exactly. I think that's probably close to the origin of that concept

exactly. Nice. Nice. Right. So there's there's, it's a different path of development, right? The, the, the, the path is not there to get you rich. It's, you know, to make your economy, you know, set up so that it produces value for the, the global north, right? That's a really great book.

I need to finish it. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. The Walter Roddy. For sure. So, yeah. So, these are the, you know, some of the alternative theories that were, going to go through and then the final part of the course is we're going to look at actually sorry there's two more parts um so after the economic theories we are going to spend a couple weeks on

looking at alternatives right so the different you know proposals that come out of these heterodox theories for how we can do the economy differently right so um you know types of socialism and communism, right? The solidarity economy, right? Worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, right? We're even going to look at like, I think, social democracy, right? You know, keeping capitalism, but just regulating it with the government, right? And, you know, explore these alternatives, right?

And compare them. And then, at the end of the course, the last class, or the last one or two classes, is going to be all about student organizing at the university. So, you know, how do we, you know, take this course and how do we actually, you know, get it instituted into the curriculum is kind of the goal here. Very cool. And, yeah, I think it is a really neat idea. Actually, tying it in with a sort of practice, right, a way of like putting these ideas

into motion such that you can actually get these dissident or head. Addox ideas, more breathing room within the university and within the economic department on a given campus. Exactly. And our kind of time frame for this, we decided on this, you know, as like a kind of a two-part strategy. So the first part is this fall, so fall 2023, we're going to conduct this course virtually, right, and kind of a centralized. way. So the whole course is going to be happening online. I believe it's going to be Mondays at 5 o'clock central time, or maybe it's 6 o'clock central time. It's on the website. And so we'll have the class meet, you know, once a week. We'll go through the curriculum. You know, kind of, yeah, and this, I mean, really, not a lot of, you know, participatory pedagogy like there is in the economics

for Emancipation course, but the idea is we'll get through the content and everybody, all y'all who, you know, take this course online, you know, and then in the spring semester, in spring 2024, then you can take that course to your college and you can actually put it on, you know, with the syllabus, with the training that we've done, you know, maybe with some other, you know, student organizations that are around and you can bring this course to your college so you know

one option is you know the old free university thing where you just kind of set the class up you know anybody who wants to come you know attends it's not for credit you know that's one way another way is most university or a lot of universities

have what are called student initiated classes or student precepted classes So if you're a college student, you know, you might ask, you know, your counselor, you know, sometimes you have to ask professors specifically, but there's, there's, I think usually a way for you as a student to initiate the class, to get it, you know, maybe it's an interdisciplinary, you know, 300 level class, and it only counts for two credits, or maybe it counts for three credits, but you can take this class and, you know, put it on, you know, conduct it. You know, things might get easier if you find a sympathetic professor, right? Because, you know, a lot of neoclassical professors understand the problems, right? And they just, you know, haven't had an alternative presented to them.

So they really don't believe there is an alternative, right? But if you show up and say, hey, we have this whole syllabus, you know, then maybe, you know, they'll go for it. There's a few other options, right? Um, we've also tried to get accreditation from, I forgot which university. Um, I think that's still in process. But, uh, that's the idea, right, is to use this course as an organizing tool, uh, and also as a possible replacement for, you know, standard neoclassical econ 101. I, I love it. I absolutely love it. I think it's incredibly

admirable, um, weaving this entire sort of program where you help educate people and then, you know, urge them on to see if they can bring it to their school. You're not just challenging these ideas in the abstract of coming on and giving, you know, dissident opinions or critiquing certain bedrock assumptions, but now you're actually giving resources to people both in and outside of college for organizers and students who want to challenge it from outside or inside academia, giving people real options to do this, helping even like this revitalizing student organizing at university segment is really interesting. the idea of trying to find a professor who could be sympathetic to learning, which is really what this is at the end of the day, learning other things other than the orthodoxy, other than what is supposed to be the only way to think, right? This is like core to the idea of universities and professors where we challenge ourselves intellectually. We wrestle with different ideas. So I love that this is not merely, which is still important, but abstract political education where you're just saying, hey, this is all the ways neoclassical economics gets things wrong um it's it's more than that it's it's also including a practice element um it's giving people at different levels of society inside and outside the university different options i absolutely love it and hats off to you and all the comrades and folks uh working on this stuff it's a really really wonderful a project you're doing so yeah thank you so much i'll give you

really quick um any last words you want to say anything else you want to tell the people and also if somebody listens to this episode and really wants to reach out to you personally, perhaps. I'll just make sure to include your email in the show notes. But yeah, any last words or anything you want to say as we wrap this wonderful conversation up, my friend? Absolutely. First, thank you for your kind words. It's, yeah, it's been a lot of getting these things together. And, you know, they started before I got on the scene, too. So I really appreciate your kind words. You know, second off, I just want to agree, you know, if it was a lot of, you know, if it was a as easy as proving the neoclassical economist wrong than we would have won a long time ago and is

really about building power right um and yeah i would say um i mean i hate economics that's why i signed up it and i think it's you know evil ideology and it's useless uh if you have any questions you know to the listeners you know please hit and be up yeah my proton mail will be in there um you know sometimes it takes me a little while to respond but uh i think i've responded to everything so far. And yeah, I'm always happy to, you know, to talk more about economics. I guess maybe one closing thought is, you know, the student-initiated course route. You know, if you want to, you know, take this class to your school, which, you know, I mean, that's part of why I'm here right is to encourage you to do that. You know, most colleges have this, right? I went to Truman State University,

in rural Missouri, and it's like a state, you know, liberal arts college. And I took three different student-initiated classes when I was there, expanding environmental consciousness, the understanding the Black Lives Matter movement, and introduction to the Marxist theory of capitalism. When we were going through that process, there's a lot of people, you know, faculty, you know, office managers, whoever, who, you know, didn't know that that existed. You know, that literally didn't think that was an option. So I would encourage you to really, if you're going to do that, you know, route, you know, keep asking, right?

You know, ask professors, you know, especially like social movement types, you know, because often there is a mechanism for you to bring that class, you know, to the school. And, lastly, I, you know, maybe you all probably already know this, but this is a really incredible time, you know, to be alive, right? You know, the field of economics and neoclassical economics is, you know, there's a lot of signs that it's on the way out, you know, which means this is our opportunity, you know, just like, you know, revolution in general, right? But, you know, there's a lot of opportunities here and a lot of demands, you know, a lot of desire, right, that people want something different, right? they want an alternative, you know, economic theory. And I'm a Marxist, obviously. I'm, you know, very committed to Althasarian Marxism. But I think an important part of this project is that we keep it pluralists and that we learn how to have these conversations and debates with each other.

If we can't do that, then we can't even, you know, talk to economics professors, right? And I think that's it. Hell yeah. I don't know if there's, you know, we're only going to win if we can organize the movement, right? If you're a student, if you're not a student, you know, here's a couple, I think pretty excellent resources for understanding the strange, you know, obfuscated world that is economics. Yeah. Yeah, I love that point. Very well said.

And I totally agree that I think the neoliberal era is dying. And I think with that era, dying also comes the death of its dominant economic, sort of ideological underpinnings, neoclassical economics. And so, you know, I strike when the iron is hot. This era of life that we were born into, it is dying. And there's no guarantee about what comes next. Certainly no guarantees at all. But there is these doors opening for new ways of thinking, for challenging orthodoxies that haven't been challenged in decades. in real ways, there is a increasing understanding on behalf of people across society and all

spectrums of the class divide that the way things are have to radically change. And so when those moments of really crisis, which is what we're living through, happen, there's both barbarisms and opportunities, right? There's both doors closing in our face as well as doors we never thought would open, opening. And it's up to us to organize and take advantage of those at whatever level that we can. And so with neoliberalism itself, you know, exiting stage left, neoclassical economics, also coming under, you know, renewed and vigorous attack from different and new angles. This is a really important time to pursue these paths that our friend Will here has helped lay out for us and provided for us. So thank you so much, my friend. It's always a pleasure

to talk to you. Again, if people did not hear our first interview with Will, the episode is titled Louis Althusair, Marxist theory and philosophy. We'll link to it in the show notes. Another wonderful episode, wonderful conversation. I always love talking with you, Will, and you are welcome back on Rev Left anytime for any reason, my friend. Right on. Thank you so much for having me, Britt. Like I said, I'm a long time listening to this show. I've learned so much from Rebleft Radio, and it's truly an honor to be here. So I'm glad this worked out. Thank you for having. Huh Uh

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