(Slightly edited to temper my tone. I find it easy to get a little het up about these topics.)
Yanis Varoufakis continues to do a wonderful job of indicting neoclassical economics’ claims of being apolitical and disinterested. I’m liking his book more and more, and finding it a welcome antidote to textbook authors like Mankiw as well as Marxists like Gibson-Graham, because it actually directly critiques neoclassical economics on its own terms, rather than taking the Marxist end-route around the neoclassicists.
One small example: Varoufakis contends that “neoclassical economics can be viewed in two distinct ways: as an attempt scientifically to understand our society, or as an attempt to produce a theory which will under no circumstances recommend that those who currently have social and economic power be stripped of it” (93). You know which side I’m on: neoclassical economics, as a science, is at its heart deeply conservative.
Consider also the claim of neoclassical economics — made most stridently by Henry Hazlitt — that economics is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Stuff and nonsense: as Varoufakis points out, neoclassical economics consistently invokes the equi-marginal principle to suggest, again and again, what perfectly rational buyers and sellers “should” or “ought to” do.
Finally, the most worthwhile indictment yet from Varoufakis: a science such as neoclassical economics “which can explain everything under the sun as ‘rational’ is a theory which cannot distinguish between the rational and the downright foolish” (101).
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