Another kind of circus

"Indeed, the typical graduate macroeconomics and monetary economics training received at Anglo-American universities during the past 30 years or so, may have set back by decades serious investigations of aggregate economic behaviour and economic policy-relevant understanding. It was a privately and socially costly waste of time and other resources."

--W. Buiter. 

That's Buiter, mind you, not some radical or non-economist. 

What the university and what economics offer is a fragmentary perspective. We're here just to ask questions, not tell you what the answers are; it's all relative; identity is a construct, gender is a construct (what isn't a construct, one would like to know!). Which is all more than convenient for late capitalism which eschews the notion of fixed markers and any idea of sociality in favour of an "atomistic" individual (a 'picture', if that's the right word, that is enhanced by the prestige of science).

So, in this universe it is quite possible-likely, even-that some people can be fantastically clever in a technical sense but, because they have no depth of historical understanding, no philosophical inclinations (and even if they did, it is beaten out of them pretty fast by schooling and the disciplines so that no fundamental questions can be posed), the result is always a partial understanding and a partial critique. 

We can never understand what's really happening because we cannot relate changes in ideas to both wider changes in cultural values or to our daily lives. A better education, for instance, would allow us to relate neo-classical economics to neo-liberalism and to tease out how their interactions play out in our attitudes, preferences and feelings as well as how the latter are given expression and, in part, formed by our institutions.

The greatest success of the system is that it has hoodwinked everyone into believing that they are free (or, more accurately, that freedom can be reduced to the act of choice and that every social formation is, by definition, an infringement on that freedom). Closely associated with that idea is the belief that everything can and should be alienated (that itself entails quantification, abstraction, commensurability and institutions that both allow and encourage the sale of the self).

Freedom is sipping an extra light soya latte made with fair trade coffee beans while you update your facebook page and skim the news flashing on another screen. You pay for the "experience" with a credit card issued by a bank with a dubious history of financial dealings-but, hey, which bank hasn't. And all the time you convince yourself that you're hip enough to have escaped the clutches of capitalism and the desire-machine-the "system" that imposes its values on you when the truth is that you're already deeply implicated in it with your own little private rebellion. You ain't the ringmaster, for sure, but you've jumped through enough hoops.  

What can never be countenanced in this great era of individual autonomy is that you've been sold down the river. That the very resistance against the mainstream is now what the mainstream wants never occurs to you. Rebel sell. The shock of the new. Pushing the boat, resisting conformity..repeat after me: We're all individuals. And the pathetic sight of seeing the Guardian flogging 'Je suis..' pencils in solidarity with those who stand up to authority. The uber-cool computer geeks who make a billion from their own back garages, the "innovators" and "entrepreneurs" who create wealth for us all. And who isn't an entrepreneur now that self-management and self-improvement is the order of the day? 

The bourgeois bohemians and the hippie chicks that are into Zen, "spirituality," mindfulness, deep ecology (but then again, so is your typical CEO of your big multinational). Cultural capital, social capital, sexual capital. The word capital..er..sort of gives it away!