Along with Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, I’m reading Foundations of Economics: A Beginner’s Companion, by Yanis Varoufakis. It’s pretty helpful as an introductory text, and much more nuanced and careful than the Mankiw Kool-Aid dispensed to many freshman econ sections. While Varoufakis struggles with a semi-dorky tone that’s miles away from Heilbroner’s eloquence, and makes embarassing flubs when he strays from his own discipline, the arrangement of his book into tripartite sections — first a chapter on basic concepts, then a review of the history of those concepts, and finally a radical critique of those concepts — is wonderful.
Varoufakis summarizes “the equi-marginal principle. . . at the heart of neoclassical economics” (35) in the following way: “Stop ‘acting’ when your marginal benefits from the ‘activity’ equals your marginal costs” (35). The implications of such a change are interesting: “with an exclusive focus on individuals, social classes ceased to exist in the eyes of the theorist. People were simply distinguished along the lines of how much utility they ended up with and, thus, the concept of a capitalist or a worker was lost: everyone became an entrepreneur, a seller, a consumer. Each maximised utility as best they could” (36). Furthermore, “Whereas capital to the classics meant machines capable of physical production, in neoclassical theory the only thing that mattered was the production of utility. As long as utility was produced, it did not matter how it was produced: by a commodity manufactured in a factory brimming with technology or by a comedian who makes people laugh” (37).
There are some interesting things going on here. First, Varoufakis complicates my characterization of the neoclassical conception of technology: his suggestion is that technology simply doesn’t matter, whereas my view is that neoclassical economics views technology as simultaneously essential and transcendent, as both an integral part of the economy and as something beyond and out of reach of the economy. (I should point out now that I think contemporary economic theory has now reached a point beyond what the textbooks call neoclassical economics, and has extended into something like post-neo-liberal-global-freeperism. But I’m talking from a position of zero knowledge, as a non-economist.)
Second, Varoufakis couples that concern about technology to a concern about the role of the individual, which is a dispute that’s been at the heart of rhetoric and composition studies for a long, long time. If we want to put it in ideological shorthand, it’s like this: Peter Elbow talks about individuals and David Bartholomae talks about groups. Yes, that’s reductive and unfair, but I think it’s also a useful distinction, and sufficiently true to be worth basing an argument upon — although I’m also happy and willing to be corrected on this issue. The difficulty is that most of the people in rhetoric and composition who are talking about class are talking about class in terms of the authenticity and lived experience of the individual, and not about class as a group phenomenon.
What I’m hinting at here, and what I really need to flesh out, is my conviction that the philosophy of radical individualism is deeply connected to technological instrumentalism, and both of those philosophies are building blocks of contemporary mainstream economic thought. For students who write papers in wired composition classrooms, such a combination can seem to lead, hermetically, towards a critique-free position in the global information economy.
I want to believe that there are alternatives to this.
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