The discipline of economics should either be dismantled or completely integrated into other social science disciplines. The present crisis is, of course, inherent in capitalism and such crises will only end with our revolutionary exodus outside and beyond capitalism. Its main ideological causes, however, have come from academic economists’ development of an orthodoxy around the “rational expectations hypothesis” since the 1970s, which “asserted that a market economy should be viewed as a mechanical system that is governed, like a physical system, by clearly-defined economic laws which are immutable and universally understood.” This article gives a good description of the relation between economists and the present crisis. (For a more academic reading of how economists have produced the abstraction of ‘the economy,’ see Timothy Mitchell’s “Rethinking economy” (paper here) - here’s the abstract:
Rethinking economy requires rethinking the relationship between economics and its object. The economy is a recent product of socio-technical practice, including the practice of academic economics. Previously, the term “economy” referred to ways of managing resources and exercising power. In the mid-twentieth century, it became an object of power and knowledge. Rival metrological projects brought the economy into being. The development of the modern electricity industry illustrates the kind of work involved. It required new technical processes, new forms of distribution, addressing, and monitoring, new forms of calculation that were simultaneously electrical, chemical, economic, and social. Analyses of how the economic is embedded in social ties or in cultural meanings cannot understand these intersecting projects. The projects that form the economy involve the work of economics. Economic knowledge does not represent the economy from some place outside. It participates in making sites where its facts can survive. The case of an economic research project on property rights in Peru illustrates how this happens. Economic facts were established in a world that was organized, through speciWc projects, such as the property titling programs of Hernando de Soto, to enable economic knowledge to be made. There is no simple divide between a virtual world of economic theory and a real world outside it. Every economic project involves multiple arrangements of the simulated and that to which it refers.
