In recent times, debates have emerged in the public space around academic dogmatism and the monopoly of truth that an ideology could impose on a field of the human sciences. While philosophy or sociology are assailed by the rectitude of culture woke, it is a university science about which little is said and which is also dominated by the hegemony of a restrictive ideology: economics.
A discipline that dreamed of being science
By nature, economics studies society and the interactions between the individuals who compose it. It is therefore qualified as a human (or social) science, and thus remains dependent on the variability of human behavior.
These being sometimes irrational, the study of economics must therefore be limited at best to models which describe an optimistic reality or, at worst, a pure utopia. However, instead of embracing its social vocation and its natural boundaries, economics as it is taught persists in unreason in imagining a pure, experimental and mathematical science, like physics.
Unfortunately, this fantasy of accuracy caused by the illusion of the neoclassical school of economics derails its teaching towards theoretical notions disconnected from any practical reality and which are justified by qualifying them as a “simplifying” model. This quantitative claim, which relegates every individual to the rank of amoral and maximizing automaton, reveals the true principle of this ideology: the mathematization of human behavior. From then on, choosing between evading taxes or not becomes a function of risk aversion, deciding to buy a second car becomes a utility equation, and existential social questions are quickly resolved by the welfare theorem…
Economics, a global social science
The typical economics student will work in a bank, corporation, or government. How do we hope to form enlightened citizens who are open to others by providing, during their training, notions where a man’s mind can be reduced simply to the cold rationality of an algebraic equation and where the maximization of profits is, in all cases, the objective to be achieved?
I think that the discipline as it is currently taught is deficient and that it must introduce a broader vision of social phenomena, with the help of psychology and political science, in particular. This reform would make it possible to embrace the fundamentally human vocation of the economy, which we tend to forget in our world regulated as a real industry, and would contribute to the training of leaders who do not consider, for example, the fate of thousands of people as a matter of budget.
It is imperative that the teaching of a discipline so important for our society be reviewed and modified, but above all criticized and broadened towards both mathematical and moral horizons. It is only then that the study of economics will offer a global education adapted to the future challenges of our societies and of the world.