The Rise of Anti-Economics: How the Western Public Discourse is Infused by the Opposite of Basic Economics

My thesis in this essay is that we now live in an era of anti-economics. Just like antimatter is the opposite of ordinary matter, the Western public policy discourse now seems permeated by anti-economics – the opposite of ordinary or basic economics.*

I readily admit that politics rarely have been a theatre for sophisticated economic arguments – a space where intelligent people have met to diagnose economic problems and come up with rational cures. Unlike today, however, basic economic realities were usually observed in past and those populating the corridors of economic decision-making seemed to have a common core for interpreting them. Now the political world is routinely serving us with propositions that all too often defy basic economic insights – the Econ 101 comprehension that form our economic sensibility. Many of those trusted with power in economic policy – yes, many economists – seems to operate without any organising epistemic principle and get trapped in behaviour that are opposite to elementary economics. They too are part of this zeitgeist: anti-economics.

Tariffs and Price Controls

Start with the obvious: the US election campaign. Donald Trump is doubling down on tariffs, a policy that – contrary to his assertions – will raise domestic prices, reduce exports, and reallocate production from productive to less productive activities. If I hazard a guess based on modern history rather than proven economics, it is likely that big tariff hikes will undermine national security too. Yet Trump still thinks “tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented” and now takes the case for tariffs a significant step further. This summer he’s been floating the idea of substituting the federal income taxes with tariffs, or a version of such a tax flip, emulating a view that has been popular among many on the political right over the years.

Would it work to recreate the type of tax code (high tariffs and no federal income tax) that the federal government had in the 1800s? Let me offer a very unoriginal response: no! For a country running a 1.8 trillion-dollar fiscal deficit, any sign of the government being purged of revenues will have a chilling effect on the economy, to say the least. Interest rates would go up, for instance, and not just for the federal government: the cost of capital would go up for every borrower.

Yet the arithmetic behind Trump’s tax-flip is even more illusory. The federal government takes in about 2.2 trillion dollars every year in income taxes. With total US import of goods standing at 3.1 trillion dollars, there would have to be a very high tariff on all imports (about 70 percent) to theoretically collect the same revenues as the federal income tax. Then, of course, high tariffs suppress imports. The tax base will disappear.

Kamala Harris, for her part, seems to like tariffs too, albeit not as has much as “tariff man” Trump. The Biden-Harris administration largely kept the Trump administration’s protectionism. As an echo from the past, it has also pursued a substantial industrial policy and reinforced “Buy America” provisions in public procurement. Through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and other packages, the Biden administration has showered favoured companies with subsidies and tax credits. Only the IRA has been estimated to amount, over some years, to about 800 billion dollar (some suggest the total bill could be substantially higher). Other packages also provide hundreds of billions in discretionary support over the same period.

This is a lot of money. In fact, it is so much money one would expect the benefits of industrial policy to be so obvious that the policy really is a no-brainer. Yet the benefits aren’t obvious – and the policy just isn’t a derivate of basic economics. Obviously, there has been an investment or capital expenditure increase in the US over the last years, driven to an extent by firms investing more because of the IRA and its tax credits. But several other factors were already pushing CapEx spending in this direction: increased storage of goods to make supply chain more resilient, for instance, and corporate spending on building new data centres. Much of this would have happened without the IRA.

There are other aspects of the IRA that are rarely broadcasted by its supporters. Racking up more government debt to actually fund these new industrial packages lead to interest rates that are higher than they otherwise would be. Importantly, there is a big part of the IRA that is targeted at discretionary spending (federal grants, loans, guarantees, et cetera), which doesn’t show an equal amount of, ahem, progress – owing to high costs for staff and sourcing, for instance. Just like in Europe, there is a lot of talk but not so much walk. For instance, planned battery and semiconductor plants in the US have been delayed – or shelved entirely. Investment in solar is also mute, despite big offers of subsidies.

Getting some things to move when the US government is spending so much money isn’t difficult: “any jackass can kick down a barn”, as the Americans say. The question is how durable many of these investments will be – or if they actually will be worth the cost to the public purse? Yet such finer points don’t have much purchase in the US debate over industrial policy – at least not in this age of anti-economics. Rather, opinions are crude and often based on unbelievable claims

The same conclusion holds for “Buy America” procurement rules. They receive bipartisan support and, these days, are rarely exposed to political scrutiny. Given how liberally the rules are applied, and the prospect of the US making them even more powerful through increased levels of domestic-content requirement, it really wouldn’t be too much to ask supporters to show us some supporting evidence that “Buy America” works and is good for the economy. However, such evidence is hard to find and, remarkably, very few in the US debate seem to care.

Kamala Harris has also flirted with nationwide rent controls and bans on grocery price gouging. Just as with tariffs, price controls are as close as you can get to anti-economics: it is the opposite of economic sensibility and disregards introductory-level training in economics. And it isn’t just about theory. Price controls failed already in the age of Babylonia, and since then many leaders and countries have made new attempts to get price controls to work without causing huge economic damages. The result? They cause supply shortages and higher prices.

The Nixon administration’s policy of price and wage controls in the early 1970s is a case in point. Coming out of the Bretton Woods system with spiralling inflation, the purpose of Nixon’s price controls was to avoid price hikes for households and businesses. Yet suppliers responded by reducing supply. As two observers have noted about the experience: “Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.” Rent controls prompt similar results. In fact, the effects of abolishing rent controls seem much closer to the intention behind rent controls (assuming it is low rents) than the actual controls themselves. Argentina, for instance, has just taken away its rent controls – and the result is what anyone trained in basic economics would expect: the supply of rental properties has increased rapidly and real rental costs have fallen.

No, this isn’t rocket science, and this is exactly my point. Anti-economics is not a creed that disputes or dismisses the more elaborative, elusive, and speculative elements of economics. It defies the most basic elements of it.

Economics – From Peak to Through

The rise of anti-economics is surprising for someone of my age. For a quarter century, up to the end of the Great Recession, the academic leitmotif of the West, if such a thing would exist, was economics. This zeitgeist was captured in James Carville famous slogan for the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign: “it’s the economy, stupid!” Entering university around that time, economics was the social science discipline du jour for my generation: the classes you’d take if you wanted to work on the central societal malady of our time. Around us were economists galore who called the bluffs of those making spurious claims in favour of tariffs, price controls and other examples of anti-economics. Unlike now, the public discourse helped many of us to develop an economic sensibility.

Black Wednesday in September 1992 was a pathfinding event, at least for those of us affected by the UK economy or that lived in other countries with fixed exchange rates tied to the Deutsche Mark. The pound dropped like a stone as Britain pulled out of Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM): the real value of assets and income fell, adding new problems to an already weak economy. I secretly cheered that day because I had won a scholarship (denominated in the Swedish krona) to study in England. My money, I thought, would now last a lot longer: the shy Swede would now be the king of the college bar. It was a foolish thought, of course, and the joy lasted only a few weeks. Sweden then became yet another country to fall prey to the danger of fixed exchange rates. My money lost a lot of value. I would be lucky if I could afford half-pints.

We all got a lesson in bad monetary policy. From then on, the evening news had daily reports from the headquarter of the Bundesbank – the gnomes in Frankfurt that ruled European money markets. The growing role of financial markets made the best and the brightest to head for jobs at the likes of Goldman Sachs: positions that ensured respectful treatment both on Wall Street and in the Vatican. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, first became a national treasure in the US after steering the economy through the stock market crash in 1987. Then he was promoted to global economic divinity. Bob Woodward’s biography summarised the status of Greenspan in the book title: “The Maestro”. When the Time Magazine in 1999 called for a “Committee to save the world”, Greenspan was number one.

I agree it all became a bit too much, but the age of economics delivered many positive outcomes for people. Many sectors were rid of foolish forms of regulations, including price regulations and supply restrictions. Public monopolies that grossly underperformed and delivered horrible services were privatised or forced to accept competition. Many central banks became independent and didn’t anymore take instructions from governments. Central banks, along with bond markets, also made the budget restriction a stronger reality for governments, at least for a while. Competition authorities added vigour to their work by providing solid economic evidence for targeted actions. Public administrations became smarter because they regularly applied economic analysis in their work. Regulators finally started to do that as well: public transport, airports, energy systems – to name just a few examples – became a lot better as a consequence.

Times have changed. Two recent events illustrated to me that we really have moved into an era of anti-economics. First, there has just been a public policy debate in the United Kingdom about “victims” having to pay market prices for tickets to an Oasis concert. Heck, the episode even prompted a probe by a competition authority – and, now, the Aussie government is about to ban “dynamic pricing” after buyers of in-demand tickets for a Green Day concert experienced price hikes. Even at the peak of post-war economic interventionism, few in the West would argue against supply and demand defining the price of tickets to old-men reunion pop concerts.

And, second, when a US Senate Committee held a hearing on the price of weight-loss drugs in late September, it didn’t exactly go into the subtler aspects of the economics of drug pricing – for instance, inquiring if the main manufacturer of the drug has yet recouped the R&D costs for the development of the drug. No, the Senate Committee title of the hearing gave a pretty good indication of how the virus of anti-economics have spread on the Hill: “Why is Novo Nordisk Charging Americans with Diabetes and Obesity Outrageously High Prices for Ozempic and Wegovy?”

Phew! There is a lot in that title: resentment, victimhood, and the notion that a price should convey some form of political justice. It also reveals some key thoughts in the trend of anti-economics and their origin in an ancient discourse mixing psychology, religion, and philosophy. And this language is spreading. The UK debate about dynamic pricing for concert tickets happened at the same time as the government proposed new public-sector pay deals for train drivers, junior doctors and others that had been striking. The government came out against Oasis ticket prices and, obviously, in support of very big pay rises for public sector workers. The motivation was in many ways the same and show how our time now moves to a different academic chord: emotional attestation

Of course, it’s an old ploy to strike or make noise if you want higher salaries, but these demands are now cloaked in the language of psychology. A pay rise is now the validation of an identity: it is “deserved” just as pay for some other groups – say, executives – is “undeserved”. Perhaps the sentiment is right, but how would we know? Why more pay for these groups but not others? Consumers “deserve” lower prices for Oasis tickets, but, strangely, the same logic doesn’t apply to train fares, which will go up as a result of the pay deal (adding to last winter’s above-inflation fare hikes). I can’t be the only one having difficulties understanding the organising principle.

These cases, however, make clearer the differences between basic economics and anti-economics. During the age of economics, we would think that the supply and demand of labour, and their productivity, would help us figure out salaries and how the earnings of one profession would develop over time, also relative to others. Price theory was an important basis for understanding how the prices of products would evolve and that desired outcomes could only happen over time – and not because of a price control. Actually, the age of economics produced falling consumer prices in many sectors and for many products where prices were set freely and the principle of competition governed. By contrast, in the era of anti-economics we employ the philosophy and practices of emotional valorisation: economic decisions seem to be about perceptions of the self and the identity. We are expected to believe there should be one price for one product, and that it is morally right that the price is defined more by offended people than by distributed and decentralised dynamic systems like “the market”. In fact, the sheer notion of a market price now seems to be an offence to some: they want “a war on prices” rather than price wars.

Economic Policy: Hits and Many Misses

The disorienting character of anti-economics makes it unpredictable. It is not an ideology but rides on the wave of Western “de-ideologisation”, to coin a phrase. It has some roots in Ancient economic thought and in later concepts of the “just price” but is more at home in the world of click-bait social media. It’s more Gen Z than Zen. While it sometimes moves against the bastions of power, the main effect is rather that anti-economics make the public strangely tolerant of authority and power – including bad economic decisions made by economists in the position of public power.

Take the inflation spike in the last years. Isn’t it remarkable that people still accept central bankers and treasury leaders who couldn’t see high inflation coming in late 2021? Why haven’t there been stronger calls for accountability – just as happened after the global financial crisis? After all, the inflation spike was to a large extent a product of decisions made by people in public power.

Trump and the Fed had strongly supported the US economy through 2020 with record fiscal borrowing and powerful supplies of market liquidity. Then came Biden’s American Rescue Plan in early 2021, sending new cheques to every American and adding another two trillion dollars of fiscal support. It was followed by another trillion-dollar infrastructure bill some months later. While it is true that it can be a fool’s game predicting inflation, this wasn’t such a moment. Inflation expectations in the markets had already been rising. When money supply goes up as much as it did during the pandemic years, at the same time as the velocity of money went down as much as it did (there was less to spend the money on during the lockdowns), basic economics will tell you that inflation is VERY likely to follow. It’s a classic example of too much money chasing too few goods. Yet most economic leaders ensured us there was no underlying inflation dynamic. When they had to admit the bleeding obvious, that inflation was accelerating, it was said to be “transitory” and that it would go away once pandemic supply-chain constraints had eased. They were obviously wrong and, as a result, we are all a lot poorer today.

Other central economic policymakers trespass in the territory of anti-economics, too. A growing chorus of business and industry departments think economic strength comes from national self-sufficiency in an ever-growing list of “strategic” goods and technologies. Concepts like “investment” and “productivity” are conspicuously absent in that view – as are basic business economic aggregates like “sales”, “margins”, and “profits”. When Germany, together with Brussels, offered a 10-billion euro subsidy to Intel, the chip maker, to build a new fab in Magdeburg, some of us wondered how it is possible for politicians to pick one of very few companies in the chips industry who struggle to turn a profit during a market boom? Perhaps the troubles of Intel would force them to plug the investment? No, we were told, that is just irresponsible talk. Well, now they have.

And take competition policy. Competition authorities are chasing a growing number of firms, especially in technology sectors, but don’t seem to have an organising principle for what firm behaviour that should be actionable. There used to be a “core theory of harm” that motivated action but now there is only a non-transparent mix of immaterial observations and a set of assertions that, strangely, include prices being too high, prices being too low and prices being the same as their competitors. It all lead to an “artistic” and rather unpredictable approach, like taking actions against a firm for products that haven’t yet been marketed. When there is no organising principle, actions get divorced from the actual behaviour of a firm: who becomes more important than what, and several competition authorities seem to be ending up applying the Casablanca principle: “round up the usual suspects!”

Then there is the broad field of products and market regulation, where core concepts of economics – such as “incentives”, “opportunity costs” and “market adjustments” – are of central importance to getting things right. Mercator, a Berlin-based think tank, recently released a study of 1500-plus climate change policies in 41 countries and found that only 63 to be effective. Perhaps we shouldn’t be occupied by the exact number, but the broad result isn’t surprising. Any economist who has followed, for instance, recent climate change policies in Brussels would say there has been one major achievement that have shaped the desired outcome, namely the Emission Trading Scheme – notably, a price-based mechanism. But there are scores of measures that, predictably, have been ineffective – if not detrimental – for the simple reason that their design has ignored basic economics. In EU countries, the development has sometimes been worse: Germany’s “Die Energiewende” is a case in point. It has so far required, according to one estimate, a nominal subsidy level of a bit more than 300 billion euros in the last 20 years, and yet it has slowed the pace of emission reductions. The whole discussion around it has been like a parallel universe, separated from observed reality and basic facts. But the extraordinary costs was highly predictable: German economists also pointed it out when key decisions were made.

It’s the Economists, Stupid!

If this observation about the rise of anti-economics is correct, it is natural to ask what explains it. The first port of call should obviously be economics itself: didn’t economists have this coming? Many commentators seem to think so – including notable economists like Angus Deaton, a recipient of the Nobel prize in economics. The critique often starts in the financial crisis: wasn’t the financial hubris and the Great Recession evidence enough to demote economics – at least relegating it from the throne as the academic chord of the West? And in a wider sense, haven’t economists over the last decades claimed to have important things to say about matters they didn’t know much about – say, how people mate and build families, or why some get stuck in addiction? The simplistic models of economists have reduced people to crass, utility-maximising robots but the real human condition, it is argued, is far more complex. People are also frail and confused; they care about pride, honour, inequality, and community, and are alert to matters of esteem and hierarchy, relations and power. In other words, the intimidating factions of “neoliberal Keynesianism” and Chicago school “there-is-a-market-in-everything” philosophy got it all wrong and they only deserve a kicking.

I agree with some of these charges. But they are better directed against academic economics than policy economics. The intellectual hubris in many economics departments is a bit tiresome and, frankly, there is a lot of academic output in this discipline that just doesn’t pass the laugh test. The discipline would be healthier if economists would stick to their core and avoid going into subjects where economics has little to contribute.

Then again, many of these theories and conclusions never made it into policy: the stayed in academe. It’s equally notable that many of the big errors in economic policy – then and now – are the products of other professions and disciplines (hey presto, lawyers and political consultants!) rather than the seminar rooms at the Departments of Economics. And closer to the point of this essay, they certainly weren’t the result of basic economic sensibilities – the basic stuff where virtually all economists agree: that incentives matter, that economic decisions are trade-offs, that a cost means you are giving some things up, that prices are a signal of supply and demand, that rapid growth in the money supply will increase prices.

Take the case of tariffs: which paradigm has been in charge – academic economics or political strategy? Over several decades, governments across the world negotiated to bring them down. But tariffs never went away and remained at high levels in some sectors. A parallel development was that behind-the-border restrictions to trade weren’t reduced much: in the past 30 years, they have increased quite a lot. When economists are polled about their views on tariffs, or protectionism generally, the result is usually that almost everyone is against them. UChicago’s Clark Center recently released a survey showing that all members of a panel of 40 academic economists said Trump’s tariff policies are a bad idea. These economists stand on firm ground: both theory and evidence suggest tariffs are bad economic policy. But here’s the crunch: tariffs still prevail, and regulations have helped to make markets more closed. For some time, both have even been on a growing slope. And, of course, they are supported by politicians as well as voters. Simply, we aren’t ruled by academe.

Why the Rise of Anti-Economics?

I think there are better explanations to the rise of anti-economics. The first comes from the emerging experience in the last twenty years that governments can always deploy fiscal and monetary expansion to fix problems – sometimes also to avoid addressing weak economic oomph. It is, in the first place, remarkable how the balance sheets of Western central banks have ballooned in the past decades. And if we focus on the fiscal side, government debt in many Western countries has also grown at a very fast clip in this period.

For a quarter century, many Western countries always had a rational excuse for running a substantial fiscal deficit or avoiding, year by year, balancing the budget over a business cycle. We have gone through the dot-com crash, the war on terror, the Global Financial Crisis/Great Recession, the Euro crisis, the pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine – too name just the most obvious events that strained public finances in one or several countries. In these bad economic times, textbook models suggested the economy needed fiscal assistance. But corrections didn’t happen in good times, at least not to a sufficient degree. Also in good times there were arguments – sometimes rational arguments – for spending more than you have and to expand government liabilities. And this is the point: policymakers can always construct a rational argument for running fiscal deficits but, over time and in the aggregate, it changes behaviour and motivation. It damages our economic sensibility.

The US case is instructive. In 2022, the US federal government run a fiscal deficit of about 5.5 percent of GDP. It was the tail end of the pandemic and a rational argument could be made for some fiscal expansion that year. But then the fiscal deficit, as a share of GDP, grew by one percentage point in 2023 – despite high nominal growth and inflation. And now? Well, the US fiscal deficit is going to be even larger in 2024. When the US Treasury in August estimated the full-year size of the deficit for 2024, it noted it was up by 24 percent compared to the size of the deficit a year before.

US fiscal deficits are structural rather than cyclical. There is, in other words, a “method in the madness”. By the end of 2024, US public debt is expected to be just south of 100 percent of GDP. The cost of servicing the debt in 2024 has been estimated to be 892 billion dollars. Oh, and the unfunded liability in US social security is more than 60 trillion dollar. And if that isn’t enough, the unfunded liability in Medicare exceeds 100 trillion dollar. No, the US government isn’t about to go bankrupt, but nor is America an exception in the history of structural and non-war causes of deficits and debts: they expand because governments are hiding from economic problems.

Something happens to the economic psychology when the offered solution to every problem is throwing more money at it. The effect is naturally bigger if the money spent is perceived to be other people’s money. In reality, there are very few economic problems in modern mature economies that are about there being too little money available to solve them. More money can be a blessing – but also a curse. It can be “King Midas in reverse”, to quote that great philosopher of life, Tony Soprano. It becomes an excuse for not seeing things for what they are: to be occupied by the symptoms rather than root causes of problems. More money can also become a reason for people to sharpen their elbows and behave in self-indulgent or egotistical ways. A sentiment informing attitudes to fiscal policy now in many countries seems to be that “if others are getting more, I should have my cut as well.” Or as the old saying goes: “if you are not at the table, you are on the menu”.

Gradually, economic mentalities have got divorced from basic economic factors and more intimate with abstract or impressionist economic concepts – such as “the vibe” (or “the vibe economy” and “vibecession”). Regulators, like competition authorities, have started to work with potentially important but unobserved notions in specific antitrust cases, like “the downstream innovation climate”. Many climate change policymakers act as if they can will desired outcomes into being: intention and narrative matter more than observed reality. Increasingly, we are asked to engage with economic categories that are very difficult to understand in a discerning and methodical way, like “technological sovereignty” or “strategic economic autonomy”. Yes, it is easy to grasp that these categories are about something, and that this something also include matters of importance. But, like the other immaterial concepts mentioned above, they are elusive and malleable. In fact, they can be interpreted in so many ways that polar-opposite views can both claim allegiance to the same cause.

The price of fiscal profligacy, it seems, is inattentiveness to basic economics. In a world of surplus fiscal spending there is always another couple of billions available somewhere that can be used for dealing with something. It is less important to improve underlying economic dynamism. The patience for allowing the long-term dynamics of prosperity generation to determine economic outcomes is shrinking: if someone has an economic problem, it needs fixing NOW. It’s probably the greatest myth of our time that everything around us in in crisis and that they are always are – what some call “permacrisis”. It’s a mentality that gives license to anti-economics.

The ”I Me Mine” Tune of Our Time

All this takes us into the second explanation for the rise of anti-economics: that the new academic leitmotif of the West – the rhythm that guides the way we move in public discourse – is a particular brand of psychology based on notions of the true and authentic self. Yes, it’s also about self-centredness, perhaps even egotism, and what Beatles once called the I Me Mine problem. Ironically, it defines anti-economics rather than economics, a discipline with a much-maligned model of self-interest. In our new dispensation, there is an emotional essence to all of us (individuals as well as groups and larger collectives), and economic decisions are now judged by their effect on this essence. But the essence we are supposed to not just represent but proclaim is often a paralysing state: a structural situation, an anatomical or geographic reality – or, simply, a human condition – that we often can do little about and therefore deprives us of agency.

One feature of the age of psychology is the new civil religion that is sometimes called “woke” or “post-modernism”. It is part of the so-called “culture wars” that has taken a hold in especially Anglo-Saxon academic circles. But it wouldn’t be so much of a culture war if there was just one warrying faction. There is also another opposing faction – rooted in, for want of a better term, national traditionalism – and what makes the situation confusing is that this side too is a manifestation of the same type of psychology. There is an element of left and right in this – woke is on the left and traditionalism is on the right – but they have a lot in common. They are both restating cultural principles from the era of Romanticism: essentialism in identity, self and group valorisation, a Nietzschean master-slave/perpetrator-victim concept of hierarchy, to name just a few. They are both, of course, children of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The creed of the Romantic period was, to quote Hegel, “absolute inwardness” – for individuals as well as nations. It was the period which gave rise to both nationalism and socialism. The culture, many thinkers held, should premiere subjectivity and scorn anything claiming objectivity – not least scientific objectivity – or said to be “cold facts”. Rousseau had his Damascene conversion while on his way to his friend Denis Diderot, sensing in a flash moment that civilisation had enslaved rather than liberalised man. In his own words, “our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved”. From now on, Rousseau aspired to be “the hero of my novel”. For Goethe, or his young Werther, people observing rationalist thinking were like drunken madmen. He had found a better vantage point of the real world: “I return into myself, and find a world”. Romanticism, suggested Hegel, had “dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity”.

Romanticism unites the two major political, “identitarian” branches of this new age of psychology. And it has a common economic worldview: anti-economics. The principal foes of the romantics were all those thinkers – Locke, Voltaire, and Smith among them – who had sketched the principles of liberalism and modern economics. Philosophers in the German historical school took aim at the approach taken by the liberals and the economists. The economy, in their view, was not a plus-sum game, but mostly a zero-sum activity: someone wins, someone loses. The commercial society corrupted the soul with its materialism and habit of treating people as rational actors. Johan Gottlieb Fichte, a philosopher of German nationalism, summarised his thoughts in The closed commercial state, taking Rousseau’s social-contract view into economics with an emphasis on justice and rights. This required a planned economy and self-sufficient nations. It still reads like a manifesto for anti-economics – or an instruction book for how to be aggrieved by concert tickets prices and the cost of weight-loss drugs!

A philosophy that starts in psychological inwardness and the primacy of self-identity seems to end up with an undisciplined, monistic, and somewhat authoritarian view of power and government. It’s not about tyranny or dictatorship, but the there is significant space for any power to move society in a way that conforms to the habit of valorisation. Every subject is enrolled into the large project and competing power bases must conform – or desist. Power often moves in unpredictable – perhaps even arbitrary – ways, but the underlying assumption is that man is not capable to make the right decisions. She needs the validation and a mandatory ascription.

For all its faults, economics treat man as individuals – and as adults. Basic economics is all about basic human cognition. We respond to incentives. We can make informed economic decisions – and learn from the bad decisions we make. We can broadly arrange our own priorities. Man can understand the economy around her and how to “better his own condition”, as Adam Smith famously put it. In our new dispensation, in anti-economics, people are rather seen as gullible and naïve – malleable even. We can turn left or right, vote labour or conservative, for Harris or for Trump: they are all too often votes for more anti-economics.

*I got inspiration for this essay from Niall Ferguson’s recent article on The Return of Anti-History.