SlowpokeBlog

This one was inspired by both SiCKO, arguably Michael Moore's finest movie to date, and a recent NYT piece about "rebel economists" who dare question the so-called free-market orthodoxy held by a majority in the discipline (as if markets were not intricate legal constructions in the first place).

Though some in our binary-thinking culture may perceive that I'm arguing against capitalism in this cartoon, I'm not. I am trying to show how overzealous worship of the "magic of the market" becomes a religious belief system, one that is about as tethered to reality as the teachings of various cults. We don't think of the disciples of Milton Friedman as cult members; after all, they look perfectly normal in their suits, and tend to keep their hair under control. (No offense to the well-groomed cult members out there.) But when a top-down ideology trumps -- nay, blinds people to an empirical understanding of the world from the ground up, fills them with purpose and wonder, and becomes the unassailable answer to anything, well, you're dealing with a form of faith.

Here's an excerpt from that NYT article illustrating this point:

Mr. Card is by no means on the fringe, but he said his research on the minimum wage in New Jersey "caused a huge amount of trouble." He and Alan B. Krueger, an economist at Princeton, found that contrary to what free-market theory predicts, employment actually rose after an increase in the minimum wage.

When Mr. Card’s graduate students went on job interviews, he said other economists would ask questions like "What’s wrong with your adviser? Has he started drinking?"”

This is why Mr. Blinder said he advises graduate students "not to do what I do" when it comes to challenging the standard model.

Criticizing the approach that currently dominates the field, Mr. Blinder said economists must look more closely at the real world instead of modeling it in the lab. "Economics is insufficiently scientific," he said. "Mathematics may be useful, but mathematics is not scientific."

How dare these mere mortals question The Hand!