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1.
econ 101 (macro and micro economics) is the systematization of the elementary features of market ideology.
it refers to that ideology for its justification, its content and its form
it does not, and cannot refer to economic activity as it unfolds in the social world.
"reality" is excluded a priori.
however, because these ideological exercizes are elaborated in quasi-mathematical language, they are understood as being more serious or descriptive than they are.
among the assumptions that leak from this space (fiction with equations) are:
the notion of the rational economic actor.
the notion of self-regulating markets
the coherence of the idea of supply and demand as descriptive of anything that operates in actually existing capitalism.
the notion of state intervention in economic activity as a distortion.
1a.
further explanation:
there is a very big, very well-known business school that is part of the university where i teach
the business school exerts a drag across how the economics department (which is part of another college) operates.
i get alot of students who have passed or are passing through this system.
i find that many of them forget that the elementary levels of economics as they encounter it is a series of models that refers to the wider economic ideology as its frame of reference, not to the social or the historical.
one result is that they try to use the categories they encounter through these modelling exercizes to group information, posit causal relations, situate actors, explain motivations, analyze the social or historical situation, etc.
they actually beleive that the models function analytically in the world.
that is what i referred to.
2.
on the language i use:
sometimes i have to revert to a more abstract language if i am trying to make a general point.
my choices:
either i write in these spaces in ways that more or less corresponds to how i think about these things
or i dont write here at all because some folk have trouble with the abstract stylistic choices i make, which follow from writing in a way that correlates to how i think.
i debate this from time to time as i sit here for longer than i should engaging in arguments that seem to run at about a 50/50 rate in terms of pointlessness.
it's funny, though:
i dont see many folk complaining about the problems that are entailed with writing in "common sense" terms, no matter how problematic the political claims that are explicitly made, and no matter how noxious the assumptions that inform them.
why is it that it is almost inevitably conservatives who complain about how i write?
what is the linkage between intellectual laziness and being on the right?
this is not to say that what i post is always totally clear--message boards seem to require a compression of thinking and encourage a speed in writing because they lure you into acting as though you are talking in a bar--even as, from time to time, you get seemingly arbitrary demands for standards of evidence that run counter to this model.
i just find it funny that it is always conservatives who complain.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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