The “dentistry” approach to economics
from Edward Fullbrook
Today’s New York Times carries a provocative and timely article by Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman related to the Occupy Movement. The movement is often criticized for failing to offer an alternative vision. The authors relate this to the failure of today’s economics profession to think in terms of and discuss economic systems. These days it hardly ever discusses the subject, “capitalism”.
This wasn’t always the case. Course lists from economics departments used to be filled with offerings in “comparative economic systems,” contrasting capitalism and socialism or comparing the French, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon models of capitalism.
We now have an economics profession that hardly ever discusses its fundamental subject, “capitalism.” Drawing on Keynes’ analogy, the authors say that, instead of looking at the whole body, economists today, like dentists, look at small parts of it and then try to remove pain.
Another downside to the “dentistry” approach to economics is that important pieces of human experience can easily fall from sight. The government does not cut an abstract entity called “government spending” but numerous spending programs, from veterans’ benefits and homeland security to Medicare and Medicaid. To refuse to discuss ideas such as types of capitalism deprives us of language with which to think about these problems. It makes it easier to stop thinking about what the economic system is for and in whose interests it is working.
Perhaps the protesters occupying Wall Street are not so misguided after all. The questions they raise — how do we deal with the local costs of global downturns? Is it fair that those who suffer the most from such downturns have their safety net cut, while those who generate the volatility are bailed out by the government? — are the same ones that a big-picture economic vision should address. If economists want to help create a better world, they first have to ask, and try to answer, the hard questions that can shape a new vision of capitalism’s potential.
The whole article may be read here.
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
I have been writing about THE ECONOMICS OF A CIVILIZED SOCIETY (a book with coauthor Greg Davidson that has been published in to a 2nd edition) and also about the alternative visions of capitalist , i.e., an entreprenurial, economic system [see THE KEYNES SOLUTUION 2009 book for a solution to current financial crisis and Euro crisis] — but can not even get any of my books reviewed by the American Economic Association’s JOURMAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE even though I have been a dues paying member since the 1950’s.
Why has the editors of the JEL refused to have my books reviewed — even when they have been pubnlished by respectable publishers such as Macmillan and Palgrave?
paul Davidson
Paul Davidson
You know the answer to that Paul. The American associations of top ranking economics journals and their editors and associates are full of neoclassical crap and employ intentionally unintelligible mathematics to support it….and dont want to tolerate any alternative visions of our capitalist system and how it could be managed better that disrupt their normative views about the supremacy of markets to behave like self serving rabid feral dogs without any leashes.
Sad to say that these so called top ranking US economics journals are hideously tunnel visioned but thats what it comes down to. Its almost a mark of distinction to be rejected by one.
Went to a conference recently at which was present a rep for one such journal in Australia who insisted that some Australian academics really needed to “get together” and hire her services (including flight and accommodation and likely high salary) to come down under and instruct the academics “precisely how (?and what) they needed to write in order to get published”.
I thought it was the academics that were supposed to be doing the thinking but apparently they need coaching by a non academic personal trainer … for a price.
Does it fit a business plan that falls within the narrative of post-cold war control mechanisms and the new unfettered nested hierarchies of political finance? Finance to empire is the name of this game with a thousand high priests and warlords all covered under a scope and scale narrative created, in large part, as economics being the business manager and therapist for the destructive creation of a civilized world. Where is the true center for Economists outside of the theoretical blue prints that draw up the rationale for more of the same? The consolidated and syndicated media pump was quick to jump on the “incoherence” of the street uprisings that started at Wall Street and has globally come to be called the “Occupy Movement” for better or worse for its ambiguous meaning (we have “occupied” much of the world…in different terms and perhaps truthfully this occupation is at the hands of the 1%). The hypocrisy running this narrative is as hard core and cold as the new aristocracy of corporate sovereignty that is writing these scripts.
But the idea that Economics itself has no empirical center outside of capital monopolistic corporate succession planning in place of society itself, is something of a refreshing clarity. Perhaps there is a new whimper growing from an empirical voice in economists outside of theoretical fallacies of distinction. We are captured and programed by elites who write their own ticket and then complete the narrative that fits their program. It is time that the new perspectives in economics arise from these ashes and give us the benefit of their true empirical measure…
Blast the center if it is simply the big lie or the equivalent thereof;…wake up Economists and join the street movement against the gilded lies.
Actually I did just about two weeks ago in an essay I wrote and in which I tried to determine the most important failures that led to the crisis of capitalism (http://www.querschuesse.de/occupy-wall-street-und-was-dann-%e2%80%93-was-wird-aus-der-marktwirtschaft/ ). Someone from the German Occupy Frankfurt Movement contacted me two days later, saying they wanted to use it as a basis for further discussion on the systemic questition.
Regarding “the failure of today’s economics profession to think in terms of and discuss economic systems. These days it hardly ever discusses the subject, ‘capitalism’.”
For good reasons. Many economists have come to realize that “capitalism” is a meaningless political propaganda term by which those who oppose the market economy conflate a free market with today’s privilege-laden mixed economies. The economics profession is wise to avoid the term “capitalism” except to critique its usage.
Possibly. It also allows many economists to avoid looking at the possible origins of the privileges that exist in today’s mixed economies. The ownership of assets has been a source of both economic and political privilege – land, slaves, livestock, stocks and bonds. It allows the conflation of ‘wealth’ and ‘merit’ based on some other criteria.
It may also conflate two ideas about competition that many economists haven’t been that careful to clarify. One is the environment – one firm vs. many, etc. The other one is the idea of rivalry between companies. To your credit Fred, you implicitly make this distinction when you differentiate ‘free market’ economies from ‘privilege laden mixed economies.’
The fact that many economists avoid the use of the term ‘capitalism’ enables those economists to use ‘free market’ ideas to discuss a system rife with power and privilege where ‘free market’ ideas do not apply. It enables them to avoid a discussion of the impact of those privileges. It enables them to retreat into the autistic world in which they prefer elegance over relevance.
We still need words to denote economic systems. We still need to acknowledge the complexities. We want to be able to examine the evolution of the economic system in Western Europe, for example, from feudalism onward. We need to specify how the later system, capitalism, is different from its predecessor. For an example of the complexity, I give you the corporation. Is this the private ownership of the means of production, or public ownership?
In other words, avoidance of the word ‘capitalism’ means ducking the outright political and social aspects that ought to be included in economics.
“Is this [the corporation] the private ownership of the means of production, or public ownership?”
That’s a damn good question, Jeff. When shares are floated on the stock market they are supposedly publicly available, though in fact they are available only to those with access to enough surplus credit to buy them. With most share ownership ruled by agents who divide it up across an ever-changing portfolio of investments, the candidates at the AGM elections end up being elected not by owners but by those who control a Ponzi scheme of companies controlling companies owned by an every-changing myriad of minority shareholders. But hey, what’s different? Who are the Parties who pay the successful candidates’ advertising expenses in Political elections?
Edward, you say “We now have an economics profession that hardly ever discusses its fundamental subject, ‘capitalism.’”
Beware of taking Kuhn’s “normal science” as being basic or fundamental, or you will thow out the necessary “revolutionary science” with the free trade bathwater. What is basic to economics is what is basic to humanity. We are animals who have to eat, have children and take care of ourselves and our young. Economics is fundamentally about what gave it its name: household management, whether the household be that of a family or the terrestrial household of the human race. It is not simply about Adam Smith’s industrial capitalism (though without the qualifier one might argue its key is investment for our children). We are agreed, of course, it is certainly NOT just about neo-Liberal “free trade” without reference to its purpose or the purpose of what is being traded: without mention of what that now effectively means – impolitely expressed as “speculate to accumulate” – given more than 95% of it is in monetarised stock markets.