Just as the Catholic Church in Europe determined the culture of Europe, so has economic theory since the advent of capitalism.
Brave New Europe
How secular and scientific is economics really, or is it simply a profession of faith in the service of financial interests? The historical narrative begins with the Reformation and works its way forward. Both men were members of the burgeoning middle class. Smith was an academic; Ricardo, of Jewish origin, was from a banking family.
Both were champions of the rising capitalist middle class, providing rational arguments to end the economic and political domination of Britain by the landed aristocracy. It was the beginning of the political decline of the aristocracy, whose dominance had survived the religious upheavals in Northern Europe. A new church had been founded.
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What Rapley describes in the following chapters is the repeated adoption of new orthodoxies by economists adapted to the dominant political and financial powers of the time, providing each with a dogma and moral code to fit its interests. Yet each new faith is doomed to decline as its myths are exposed: Economics is based on the behaviour of human beings, and there are few, if any, universal laws concerning our decision processes.
A standard model of homo economicus simply does not exist.
As he writes towards the end of his book: Tell this to the academics whose salaries are paid by rich university patrons or by research grants from governments and corporations. They have become the minions of the system they helped to create and have propagated.
Twilight of the Money Gods | Book by John Rapley | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster UK
Those in thraldom are not likely to sunder their chains, especially if they are gilded. So we are eagerly awaiting a new set of prophets who will lead us out of Egypt to the Promised Land. Book review by David Shirreff This is a passionate, well-argued plea for a European Britain, written by two avowedly socialist Remainers. They will not accept the standard disqualifier: Book review by Atul K. Shah As Private Eye journalist, Richard Brooks has long been responsible for exposing corporate corruption, especially around tax avoidance and evasion.
Twilight of the Money Gods – Economics as a Religion and How it all Went Wrong by John Rapley
One story kept on repeating in his research — […]. Twilight of the Money Gods is the story of economics, told not as the science it strove to be, but as the religion it became. Over two centuries, it searched for the hidden codes which would reveal the path to a promised land of material abundance. While its prophets—from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman—concerned themselves with the human condition, its priesthood gradually grew remote from its followers, until it lost sight of their tribulations. Today, amid a crisis of faith in their expertise, we must re-imagine the topic of economics for a new era—one filled with both danger and opportunity.
John Rapley has made a vocation of working, and living, at the intersection where theory meets practice. He now lives in London as a writer.
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