It occurs to me the obvious success neoclassical welfare economics has had these many years shutting down the social conversation about important economic issues involving the distribution of economic power and other potentially controversial ethical issues associated with resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs, wants, and desires on the basis of relative economic power in markets has come at a great cost to society. I think it’s quite reasonable to suppose many of those driven to extremist political, social, and economic ideologies in the past including especially communism and fascism were motivated in no small part by confusion caused by bad economics. More recently, the link between bad economics and various anti-democratic and indeed arguably anti-social creeds such as so-called “libertarianism” and “anarcho-capitalism” should be readily apparent to even the most casual of observers. When people can’t discuss the important normative or value or ethical issues associated with evaluating and assessing economic systems and outcomes in a reasonable and systematic way, when the proverbial wool is pulled over their eyes by those in academia in particular, when they’re told their ethical views have no standing and can’t be considered or discussed, when they’re misled into thinking certain normative or value or ethical propositions are simply a matter of logic and math and science, that’s when they start thinking in peculiar ways, saying funny things, and eventually doing funny things. And what makes it even more disheartening is it seems rather unlikely the bright minds of the economics profession stumbled willy-nilly into the opaque, misleading, needlessly complicated, rhetorical claptrap that makes up the normative content of neoclassical welfare economics and the popular and ubiquitous misinterpretations of it. Indeed, the more one looks into it, the more one considers the intellectual history and development of the field, the more one realizes the number and variety of rhetorical tricks and stratagems associated with neoclassical welfare economics all apparently designed to achieve the same end, the more one must conclude active obfuscation of normative issues is or anyway was high on the agenda of many or most academic economists in the neoclassical tradition. Indeed, one suspects the entire motivating spirit of neoclassical welfare economics was quite likely to create confusion about the normative aspects of economic issues, to shut down reasonable discussion of the ethics of evaluating economic systems and outcomes, to get one over on people, to set up a system by which clever, glib, fast-talking teachers and professors and pundits could run rings around their sincere but rather confused students and broader audience using a combination of funny terms, mathematics, and rhetorical tricks of various kinds. Academic economics and the academic economists who developed and continue to promote neoclassical welfare economics have a lot to answer for in my opinion. As scholars and intellectuals, they should be ashamed of themselves.
