View source for The Dance of the Meta-Axioms

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[[Category:Yanis Varoufakis]]
[[Category:Ideological Mainstream Economics]]
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{{DES | des = "On the dynamic mechanism by which the inescapable theoretical failures of neoclassical economics reinforce its dominance."  [[Yanis Varoufakis]] provides a plausible explanation of how three grossly unrealistic meta-axioms of microeconomics channel thought through their over-simplification. | show=}}
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Abstract: This paper argues: (a) that neoclassical economics is well defined in terms of three meta-axioms (methodological individualism, methodological instrumentalism, and methodological equilibration); (b) that their adoption is the common practice which delineates mainstream economics; (c) that while the first two meta-axioms allow for rich depictions of socioeconomic phenomena, they lead to an unquenchable indeterminacy, and (d) that the spectre of this indeterminacy generates evolutionary and social forces within the economics profession which cause practitioners to introduce stringent variants of the third meta-axiom. Thus their models’ sophisticated complexity is sacrificed in favour of a determinate framework within which not even a glimpse of contemporary capitalism is possible. Neoclassicism, we contend, owes its hegemonic position in the social sciences to this most peculiar, axiomatically inbuilt, theoretical failure.
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Concluding remark
Neoclassical economics draws its immense narrative power from an audaciously circular process of mutual reinforcement: faithful to its constitutive meta-axioms, which it juggles continuously in a manner that hides their implications (and, often, their logical incoherence), neoclassicism retains its hold over the economics mainstream and rules itself out of engagement with the logic of really existing capitalism. The latter, supra-intentionally, rewards neoclassicism with institutional power which helps it maintain a strict embargo on any serious scrutiny of its own foundations.
It seems almost indelicate to point out that, while this feedback mechanism remains opaque and unexamined by the mainstream’s critics, contemporary economic reality and mainstream economics will remain strangers who reinforce each other’s dominance as long as (a) mainstream economics remains, courtesy of its meta-axioms, innocent of the logic of capitalism and (b) the logic of contemporary capitalism spreads faster and deeper when economics’ meta-axioms help it remain invisible.
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Quite possibly, never before has intellectual history fashioned an ideological triumph of this magnitude out of a sequence of sorry, yet powerfully motivated, theoretical failures.
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