Money Is Power

A political economy parable (with a side of environmental racism)

“Political economy” may sound like an obscure technical matter, but it’s a really very simple (and incredibly important) idea: That the economy is inevitably political, and there is no way to depoliticize economic theory.

That is, every aspect of economics — taxation, antitrust, contract and labor law, etc — is fundamentally political. There is no objective perch on which an economist can stand and decide which tradeoffs are empirically best.

What’s more, any claim about such a neutral test of economics is itself political: when economists assert that “Pareto optimal” is the same as “fair,” they’re saying that the people who lose in a Pareto optimal arrangement *should* lose.

This may strike you as incredibly obvious, but if so, you’re probably not an economist. The neoliberal economic project over the past 40 years has been to assert that an economic system that benefits the rich is also the fairest economic system, and that any attempt to intervene to produce a more even wealth distribution pollutes our economy with “politics.”

This claim to objectivity is a familiar rhetorical cheat. Think of the machine learning hucksters who claim that “math can’t be racist” so we should buy their automated sentencing…