Abstract
Contemporary Economics theory prescribes “perfect” knowledge and “absolute” freedom from constraint on its economic actors. This triumph of the subjunctive prescription over the indicative description precludes treating Economics as in any way an empirical discipline on the model of the flourishing empirical sciences. Here Economics’ practitioners have fallen into (or retained) pre-modern habits of thought involving, as we have seen, both empirical arbitrariness and mathematical and other theoretical gaffes. Researchers have amassed troves of information and analysis about economic behavior, and this could—should—provide the basis for a socially reforming empirical Economics science stripped off its now omnipresent subjunctive and ideological trappings, as is here explored.
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Notes
- 1.
Via his The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Harrington 1962).
- 2.
Cited in Chap. 5 above.
- 3.
The late chronicler of US working-class life, Studs Terkel told the following tale in a lecture I attended; During the 1930s, the old Henry Ford at first furiously resisted the unionization of his shops. Then, surrendering entirely, he proposed that the new UAW union should take over the task of appointing foremen. The union adamantly refused, replying that they weren’t going to allow him to pass that onerous task onto the workers: It was his job and he should see to it!
- 4.
This notion of a “public” is from the work of C. Wright Mills (1956). Whatever one’s judgment on Mills’ overall work, his concept of a “public” remains a significant contribution.
- 5.
As Frederic Lee has shown in his comprehensive reviews of the empirical studies which we earlier cited, profit-maximization and such really don’t play a great role in normal corporate accounting and pricing decisions. Mostly, firms just add a “normal” profit mark-up to their costs (Lee 1998: 208 ff).
- 6.
This has been the international experience with such “pump priming” as well. See the discussion in the excellent Tabb 2012: Chapter 6.
- 7.
As opposed to merely inter-personal scale.
- 8.
On US bombing experience, they’d miss, more likely razing some naturist encampment perhaps, or a suburban flower show.
- 9.
For labor and trade union matters, see Brown (1986): the Introduction and Chapters IX, X, and XI; see especially the chart on page 160. For the wider thesis, see McDermott (2010), Chapter 3. The attempt, largely successful, to shift economic governance away from democratically elected national states and into elite-dominated international bodies is detailed in Tonello (forthcoming).
- 10.
White poverty, less heralded but equally harmful, is found in both rural pockets and urban settings. Eradicating it should have the same priority as that for so-called racial or ethnic “minorities”.
- 11.
Refugee flows from Middle Eastern wars, especially from Syria, are obviously of a different character.
- 12.
One should note that current debates on trade often assume that one can choose only between an absolutely “free-trade”, with its lawless working conditions (already cited), and the sort of high, trade-destroying tariffs that lengthened and deepened the Great Depression of 1932–1939. But was not “managed trade” with “bi-lateral agreements” a source of the extraordinary prosperity of European-US economic cooperation circa 1945–1960?
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McDermott, J.F.M. (2017). Economic Science and Social Reform. In: Employers’ Economics versus Employees’ Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50149-9_6
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