There’s a guy I love, named Richard D. Wolff, who loves to joke about how colleges insist on having an Economics School and a Business School, when these should theoretically be the same field of study. Then he’ll bring up a few anecdotes over professors from the respective schools arguing over this or that point of orthodoxy.
My favorite is “The Economic Calculation Problem”, a thing that Chicago School Economists swear by, but which executives at vertically integrated firms like Exxon, Walmart, and Amazon defy on a daily basis. There’s a great book called “The People’s Republic of Walmart” that suggests a lot of the underlying computational problems of economics have been resolved within these mega-corps, using the same theories and policies once practiced by Soviet-Era states.
That’s the real divide between Macro In-Theory and In-Practice. One is functionally just state propaganda, while the other is the hard math of balancing a global supply of finite resources and labor while generating consistently larger surpluses.
Non-economist: the economy must be shit because I can barely afford bread.
Economist: UR WRONG, GDP GO UP
That’s more or less the state of discourse right now and it’s embarrassing.
There’s a guy I love, named Richard D. Wolff, who loves to joke about how colleges insist on having an Economics School and a Business School, when these should theoretically be the same field of study. Then he’ll bring up a few anecdotes over professors from the respective schools arguing over this or that point of orthodoxy.
My favorite is “The Economic Calculation Problem”, a thing that Chicago School Economists swear by, but which executives at vertically integrated firms like Exxon, Walmart, and Amazon defy on a daily basis. There’s a great book called “The People’s Republic of Walmart” that suggests a lot of the underlying computational problems of economics have been resolved within these mega-corps, using the same theories and policies once practiced by Soviet-Era states.
That’s the real divide between Macro In-Theory and In-Practice. One is functionally just state propaganda, while the other is the hard math of balancing a global supply of finite resources and labor while generating consistently larger surpluses.