Josh Divine asked me to write about "5 Things Everyone Should
Know about radical economics, How Economics Departments Lie to College
Freshmen, Forgotten Insights from Marx, 5 Vital lessons from forgotten
economists, whatever," but I want to talk about art for a minute first.
It turns out this is a thing:
I think it's very modern in an unusual way. I think it's modern
mainly because it looks at the past and says things like "now a major
motion picture." I think it's modern because it looks at the past and says
"we should write our own ideas of cultural ascendancy onto this
Thing." Congratulations, Guy de Maupassant; you've made it.
That's weird for two reasons. First, Guy de Maupassant has been
dead since 1893. The Lumiere brothers' first moving picture screenings were in
1895. Maupassant never could have had an idea what a moving picture was and was
obviously decades away from the idea that making a book into a movie could
legitimize it. I mean he really couldn't have had any idea. It's not like he
was snobbish and into books instead of movies; it's that movies weren't even in
the public imagination. Even science fiction from the period doesn't imagine
movies (as far as I know; I could be entirely wrong about this, but it's a
little difficult to tell).
The second reason is the stranger one. "Now a major motion
picture" is asking you, the consumer, to believe something. I'm not sure
exactly what it's asking you to believe, but that might be the point. It tells
you a few things. It lets you know that the story contained in the book isn't
so complex that it couldn't be presented in a major motion picture. It tells
you that the book is important -- because why else would it have been made into
a movie? -- and also that movies are important, because why else would we use
them to portray important books? It tells you that if you see the movie and
have to talk about it afterward -- you are going
to see the movie with someone with whom you'll talk about it afterward, aren't
you? You're not a loner?
-- you'll be able to say "I don't know, I think I liked it better as a
book" and sound cultured. "Now a major motion picture" tells you
that this book is unpretentious social capital, so go ahead! You can read it
without being an elitist. Now, here's how you pronounce "Guy de
Maupassant" in a way that will really impress
your friends...
At which point you could stop and ask: why do I care if a book
is unpretentious social capital?
I think that's where I'd like to start with heterodox econ. It
is not possible to say of any Thing* that it is "good" in
neoclassical microeconomics. You can talk about optimal bundles, efficiency,
and rates of substitution, but there's nothing normative in the neoclassical
story. What is "good" is the best, and what is the best is what
maximizes utility. If you want to get deeper than that, you'll have to ask a
neoclassical economist what utility means. He'll say something about pleasure
and then start talking about GDP.
We could ask for different things though. We could ask our
economic system to increase happiness rather than maximize it, which might
result in a completely different view of things. We might not, with such a
request, be as impressed with more of everything. Consider, for instance, that
the current real US GDP is higher than real US GDP from before the crisis, but
in 2007 people were convinced everything would be wonderful forever, while
now... Well, you know, they're not.
We could ask our economic system to distribute benefits to
producers rather than to managers. This would be a break with neoclassical
economics as well. Marx, arguing from the labor theory of value, developed the idea of a "rate" of exploitation,
which was the ratio of the capitalist's profits to the worker's wages. We don't
think value comes from labor anymore, but rather that the value of labor comes
from the efficiency with which it produces, but, from both perspectives, we
would think productivity increases should result in higher wages. If we thought
that, we might look at the three charts in this Krugman article with alarm.
We could focus on feminist economics, and argue that GDP
accounting excludes women in a serious way (it does). We could claim that
neoclassical economics never really acknowledges families (also true) and
believes only in individuals, states, and firms. We could argue with James
Galbraith that even the critics don't get it, that those who think neoclassical economics was seduced by
mathematical beauty are significantly overestimating the mathematical beauty
while ignoring the salient problems that neoclassical economists have
continuously ignored.
The point, in general, is to criticize, to sit behind a podium
looking disappointed like Scott Brooks in a press conference after any game
played in Miami in the 2012 NBA Finals...
--By James Santucci
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