Ten Convenient Beliefs For Economists In America Today

Models that assume rational actors and efficient markets are useful simplifications rather than ideological commitments that happen to justify existing distributions of wealth and power. Convenient because the entire apparatus of mainstream economics is built on these assumptions and abandoning them would strand decades of published work.
GDP growth is the appropriate primary measure of economic welfare. Convenient because GDP is what economists know how to model, forecast, and advise on, making economists indispensable to governments and central banks regardless of whether GDP tracks what people actually care about.
Inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon requiring central bank management rather than a distributional conflict between creditors and debtors, employers and workers, or asset owners and wage earners. This keeps monetary policy in the hands of technocrats insulated from democratic pressure and keeps economists employed as those technocrats’ advisors.
Free trade produces aggregate gains even when it produces concentrated losses, and the losers can in principle be compensated by the winners. The compensation almost never happens but the in principle saves the theory, and the aggregate gains justify the economist’s policy recommendations regardless of what happens to the people who bear the costs.
Inequality is primarily a human capital problem solvable through education and skills training rather than a structural feature of how labor and capital markets distribute bargaining power. Convenient because it locates the solution in technocratic intervention rather than in political redistribution that would threaten the donors and institutions that fund economic research.
Mathematical formalization makes economic arguments more rigorous rather than simply more difficult for non-economists to challenge. This keeps the profession’s conclusions accessible only to those with the relevant technical formation, which is the coalition boundary dressed as a methodological standard.
Central bank independence from democratic oversight is necessary to control inflation rather than a political choice to insulate monetary policy from the people most affected by it. Convenient for economists who staff and advise central banks and who would lose status and influence if monetary policy were subject to ordinary democratic accountability.
Behavioral economics corrects the rational actor model’s worst failures while preserving its basic framework. Convenient because it allows mainstream economists to absorb the most damaging critiques of their field without abandoning the models, the journals, the departments, and the policy relationships built on the framework being corrected.
The 2008 financial crisis was caused by regulatory failures and irrational exuberance rather than by the theoretical frameworks economists provided to justify financial deregulation throughout the preceding decades. This belief protects the profession from accountability for its role in constructing the intellectual environment that made the crisis possible.
Economics is a science that discovers laws about how markets work rather than a discipline that constructs legitimating narratives for particular distributions of resources and power. This is the most load-bearing convenient belief because it underwrites all the others, converting the profession’s ideological function into a claim of technical authority that places its conclusions beyond ordinary political challenge.