How American Economics Failed

How Macho, Patriarchal Ideas Created a Feedback Loop That Wrecked Prosperity — Instead of Enlarged It

In case you haven’t heard, American economics is having a reckoning. After a few famous professors were unmasked as predators and harassers, more women came forth and said — hey, I have been viciously bullied. I have been abused, too. I left the field because of the abuse I suffered. Men just didn’t take me seriously — and that’s when they weren’t trying to get me in bed.

This essay, though, isn’t just about that reckoning, as necessary and crucial as it is. It’s about how that reckoning is a perfect microcosm of how American economics failed — and how, in a strange feedback loop of bad ideas becoming bad institutions, caused American society to fail right along with it. Because economics doesn’t just reflect our world, it creates it.

American economics isn’t just having a reckoning because it’s full of bullying, abusive men. It’s full of bullying, abusive men because it’s fundamental assumptions select for such people, reward and motivate people to be bullies — who then go out to create a society built on such assumptions, instead of ever investigating whether they’re true (or good) to begin with. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A hidden, ultra-destructive form of sociopolitical feedback. And that weird, strange loop, my friends, is in large part why America ended up where it is. Let me explain — because that’s a subtle, complicated idea — by way of discussing what the most basic assumptions of American economics are. Have you ever thought about them?

American economics rests on three assumptions. (They are assumptions — not really conclusions, backed by empirical evidence, but assumptions, because economics has never tested them, but we’ll get to that part). First, that people are aggressively, narrowly self-interested machines, calculators of advantage, only interested in money, possessions, things. Second, that brutal competition is therefore the only and correct way form of human organization — since, of course, people are only self-interested profit-maximizers. Third, that anyone who is not “competitive” enough is therefore a liability and a burden — which means that government should not exist, a social contract is a…