The heterodoxy has been putting up a worthy fight in the latest Twitter battle against economic orthodoxy. It feels like there are more of us now than there were before. The war, while still lopsided, has been tipped into our favor by global circumstances which have made the orthodoxy look foolish; perhaps not as foolish as it is, but foolish enough. The idea of a long run tendency towards equilibrium looks fanciful if not delusional, the political is not longer so easily cordoned off from the economic given the warmongering, and the impact of the financial sector on the larger economy is impossible to ignore. If there was ever a time for political economy and heterodoxy, it is now.
The neoclassicals and the economic orthodoxy generally have massively underestimated the extent to which their infamy and stupidity have become increasingly well known among both scholars and the general public with every crisis in the era following the great financial crisis (GFC). This post-GFC period might as well be called the Minskian era of capitalism, in which instability as the normal state of affairs has asserted itself beyond doubt or discussion. The idols of the orthodoxy are no longer so untouchable and unquestionable as they once seemed. The world is going up in flames and the best the economic orthodoxy can do is to argue for the necessity of a mathematical economics. No wonder they are not being taken seriously anymore. My suspicion is that the cumulative instability we have been seeing since the GFC will only get worse, and as it does, economic orthodoxy will get more and more vulnerable and consequently more aggressive and vicious. We should not cower or retreat. The orthodoxy will have to be outmatched, outfought and outwitted.
For one thing, I think we ought to be carefully choosing the grounds on which we fight our battles. We should pick the places where the orthodoxy doesn’t feel comfortable, the places that it abandoned: the pure creative spaces sullied by artificial intelligence, our neighborhoods and communities which were left for the market to ravage and plunder long ago, and the public sphere of which the mainstream barely has any conception.
This also means that the university as a battle ground is also no longer has the kind of importance that it once had. Maybe there was a time when the university as a battle ground still mattered. In fact there certainly was. Personally, that is why I was so invested in it. Not anymore. I think the battle there is lost and the orthodoxy should be allowed to collapse and die under its own morbid weight. We ought to leave the orthodoxy to its devices and leave it to make a fool of itself rather than helping legitimize neoclassical and mainstream departments by lending them credibility and legitimacy in the name of diversity. If they want to dominate an academic space which is faltering anyway, we should let them so that their dominance can be self-defeating.
Personally, I’ve left the university but I’m not walking away from the larger fight between economic orthodoxy and heterodoxy. I feel like I’ve never been more free than I am now to do my part in this war on the side of the heterodoxy. At the moment I am not sure how this will be, but I am sure that opportunities will present themselves, and I will be on the lookout for them.
We should also think about where and on what specific tasks we deploy our energy and efforts. I now believe that when it comes to specific people, after a while we really should not be wasting our energy trying to convince people who have made up their minds and don’t want to be convinced. We can call this the “Morpheus Principle” in reference to Morpheus’s rule to not free minds beyond a certain age from the matrix. People are still open to possibilities after their master’s program. But after the PhD, we’d might as well forget it. The PhD is a long enough and structured enough program so as to crystalize habits of thought. By the time people are done being trained in a particular framework, they are already by and large and mostly without exception set in their habits of thinking. Someone might still occasionally change their mind, but I believe the rare exceptions are the ones which prove the rule.
So we must be persuasive for some time. After that, we must offend and be on the offensive. A permanent state of defence will not do. The orthodoxy cannot be allowed to be constantly offensive and perpetually on the offensive. We have been on the defensive long enough. We must throw at the orthodoxy whatever and everything that it deserves, including mockery, disdain, even trolling. We would do well to remember that Keynes was a first rate troll, and Joan Robinson was onto something when she used the phrase “bastard Keynesians”.
We have spent long enough courting the mainstream, trying to get a seat at the table, and trying to present ourselves and our ideas as respectable. What we should be doing is turning over the table altogether, because the conditions which the economic orthodoxy has now helped create since the late 20th century rise of neoliberalism – and arguably even longer since Keynes’s work was bastardized – are intolerable.
Daniyal Khan 