I’ve recently (2021) revised my concise distillation of what I’ve concluded is wrong with conventional neoclassical welfare economics and related ubiquitous misinterpretations of neoclassical welfare economics, Bad Economics: The Hidden Normative Content of Neoclassical Welfare Economics and Its Popular Misinterpretations (2020). This book continues and refines the discussion in my previous work What’s Wrong with Economics?: How Popular Economics Generates Ignorance, Confusion, and Conflict (2019). Both are available in the Amazon Kindle bookstore. They’re currently hard to find by title in Amazon unless you use quotes to find exact phrase, I suppose because they’re just not very popular right now (can’t think why), but it’s easy to find if you search on my name, Hansel Krankepantzen.
One can find many books critical of neoclassical welfare economics, but what I feel makes my book unique is that it’s written from the perspective of economic theory itself. It takes the form of clearing up some common errors and misinterpretations relating to popular presentations of economic theory and identifying the elements of economic theory that facilitate those errors. In other words, I’m arguing normative neoclassical welfare economics does not say what many conservatives suppose it to say about the optimality of free markets, existing distributional systems including the labor and capital markets, the ill advisability of “interfering” with markets to address distributive and other ethical concerns about markets, etc. It is not the more traditional sort of critique, of which there are many and varied, but which in my experience often fall flat for those trained or working in the field because they fail to appreciate the particular rationales, methods, terminology, and nuances of economic theory and conflate issues in positive and normative economics.
I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I should mention this short work was really the work of a lifetime. My masterpiece, if you will. A bit of true outsider art for the ages. Many people have addressed the same basic issues in many different ways over the years, but the problems have evidently remained obdurately unchanged, so saying it all in my own words in what I at least consider a simple way without a lot of scholarly reference and rigamarole was for me a monumental achievement. The basic problem or difficulty I found in working out what exactly is wrong with neoclassical welfare economics as commonly understood or misunderstood, working from within the perspective of that theory itself, is that popular misconceptions about that ill-defined theory involve a devil’s stew of confusing concepts and terms, a studied lack of awareness and analysis of value premises, and a curious layering of misdirection and error, that causes any attempt to come to grips with the beast to take on a curious whack-a-mole quality in which as soon as one straightens out one issue another issue leading to much the same result springs up to take its place and sap one’s will to continue. However, after many years I’ve worked it all through to my own satisfaction. I think I covered all the major bits of nonsense in one concise essay. Basically, in my estimation, I’ve smacked the old whack-a-mole machine of bad economics with one heck of a mallet. If you’re interested in those sorts of issues you should definitely take a look.
One can find many books critical of neoclassical welfare economics, but what I feel makes my book unique is that it’s written from the perspective of economic theory itself. It takes the form of clearing up some common errors and misinterpretations relating to popular presentations of economic theory and identifying the elements of economic theory that facilitate those errors. In other words, I’m arguing normative neoclassical welfare economics does not say what many conservatives suppose it to say about the optimality of free markets, existing distributional systems including the labor and capital markets, the ill advisability of “interfering” with markets to address distributive and other ethical concerns about markets, etc. It is not the more traditional sort of critique, of which there are many and varied, but which in my experience often fall flat for those trained or working in the field because they fail to appreciate the particular rationales, methods, terminology, and nuances of economic theory and conflate issues in positive and normative economics.
I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I should mention this short work was really the work of a lifetime. My masterpiece, if you will. A bit of true outsider art for the ages. Many people have addressed the same basic issues in many different ways over the years, but the problems have evidently remained obdurately unchanged, so saying it all in my own words in what I at least consider a simple way without a lot of scholarly reference and rigamarole was for me a monumental achievement. The basic problem or difficulty I found in working out what exactly is wrong with neoclassical welfare economics as commonly understood or misunderstood, working from within the perspective of that theory itself, is that popular misconceptions about that ill-defined theory involve a devil’s stew of confusing concepts and terms, a studied lack of awareness and analysis of value premises, and a curious layering of misdirection and error, that causes any attempt to come to grips with the beast to take on a curious whack-a-mole quality in which as soon as one straightens out one issue another issue leading to much the same result springs up to take its place and sap one’s will to continue. However, after many years I’ve worked it all through to my own satisfaction. I think I covered all the major bits of nonsense in one concise essay. Basically, in my estimation, I’ve smacked the old whack-a-mole machine of bad economics with one heck of a mallet. If you’re interested in those sorts of issues you should definitely take a look.
Here’s a link to the new one. It works now, but I can’t guarantee it will work forever. https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Economics-Normative-Neoclassical-Misinterpretations-ebook/dp/B089X36TC5/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=krankepantzen&qid=1593717825&sr=8-2.
