Filed under: Chloe, Class | Tags: economics, opportunity, wall street journal
I’m a business economics student, and at some point, I came to view the standard pedagogy of economics as somewhat disconcerting—why, I have wondered, do our professors spend so much time explaining outcomes under “ideal” market conditions that never actually occur in the real world? Why are we so hesitant to fully scrutinize so many signs that these hypothetical models are materially different from the real-world market structures in which we daily operate?
Perfect competition & Pareto optimality: This rarely ACTUALLY exists in real life. So why are we taught otherwise?
Neoliberal economics preaches the sanctity of free markets, and operates on the assumption that everyone competes on equal footing, and that markets function efficiently and fairly when left to their own devices. We are obsessed with the divine gift of capitalism—a forever-burgeoning “middle class” with bourgeois sensibilities—thus, it is no accident that standard economics ignores the fates of the marginalized, and instead focuses on the “average” individual.
Maybe I’ll call the author of my textbooks and let them know that we are not all educated white males; ergo, shit isn’t as simple as they make it seem.
