At last, a new Econ 101 textbook

CORE’s “The Economy” vs homo economicus.

Neoclassical economics is a hell of a drug. It has no theory of prices, no account of inflation, and its models all presume the existence of a perfectly rational “homo economicus” who is a “utility maximizer” with perfect information.

Even the Queen is wise to the scam, grilling Bank of England economists over their profession’s failure to spot the Great Financial Crisis:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/dec/13/queen-financial-crisis-question

The profession is wild. It’s full of hired guns who use complex models to “prove” obvious nonsense, like the idea that allowing the meat-packing industry to dwindle to four firms who destroy ranchers’ livelihood while jacking up prices is “efficient.”

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/economists-to-cattle-ranchers-stop/

Economists’ greatest trick was to subordinate politics to their abstract, disconnect, esoteric “models” — neat collections of equations that, time and again, lead us into global crises that immiserate billions.

Anyone who suggests that this is not a great way to run a society is shouted down by a chorus of politicians who insist that doing good things for people is a fool’s errand, because it contradicts the…