The buffered love to worship theory while the porous are more likely to love other things. <\/p>\n
Robert Lighthizer writes in his 2023 book, No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers<\/a>:<\/p>\n Free trade is always taken as a given, not as an approach to be questioned. Rather than envisioning the type of society desired and then, in light of that conception of the common good, fashioning a trade policy to fit that vision, economists tend to do the opposite: they start from the proposition that free trade should reign and then argue that society should adapt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Why do economists venerate free trade? Because they can model it with differential equations. Anything you can’t model in a differential equation is outside mainstream economics.<\/p>\n Ian Fletcher and Marc Fasteau write in their book Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries (2025)<\/a>:<\/p>\n A major problem with mainstream economics, once one gets past recitations of free-market theology and looks at the actual scholarship, is that it is only good at understanding things that are well suited to mathematical modeling, such as price setting in freely competitive markets. It has weak insight into organization, management, corporate strategy, R&D, engineering, workforce development, the origins of technology, product design, policymaking by governments, and the strategies nations use to compete. None of these reduce to equations well, but they are central to how modern firms, governments, and thus economies function. Even some fields that do mathematize well, such as finance and international trade, are prone to oversimplifications that lead to false conclusions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n ChatGPT says: <\/p>\n Yes \u2014 the \u201cbuffered identity\u201d (in Charles Taylor\u2019s sense, the modern self that sees itself as autonomous, rational, and sealed off from transcendence) is especially prone to venerating abstractions. It\u2019s not accidental that free trade, free markets, and efficiency become \u201cdogmas\u201d within mainstream economics and policy: they are tidy, elegant, and mathematizable, which makes them feel objective and beyond dispute.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how it connects:<\/p>\n 1. Worship of abstractions. 2. Free trade as faith. 3. Mathematics as legitimacy. 4. Blind spots. In short: the buffered identity is more likely to worship abstractions like free trade and efficiency, precisely because they appear rational, universal, and mathematically defensible \u2014 which gives them an aura of inevitability. But this very attraction blinds both policymakers and economists to the lived realities of workers, industries, and communities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n University professors tend to the buffered identity. Even though he’s an Orthodox Jew and rabbi, Marc Shapiro is also a professor of modern Jewish thought at a Jesuit university<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nThe buffered self resists appeals to tradition, authority, or the sacred. Instead, it finds legitimacy in abstractions that can be formalized and universalized \u2014 like \u201cefficiency,\u201d \u201crational choice,\u201d or \u201ccomparative advantage.\u201d These concepts promise neutrality and rationality, so they replace older sources of meaning.<\/p>\n
\nLighthizer is right to call it a kind of \u201cfaith.\u201d Economists often start from the axiom that free trade maximizes welfare and then treat disruptions as side effects to be endured or patched over. That mirrors the buffered self\u2019s stance: start with an abstract principle and demand that lived experience conform to it.<\/p>\n
\nFletcher and Fasteau nail it when they say mainstream economics clings to what can be modeled mathematically. The buffered identity feels secure when reality is reduced to equations; what cannot be captured in a differential equation \u2014 culture, technology development, community resilience \u2014 gets marginalized. This is less about empirical observation and more about the comfort of abstraction.<\/p>\n
\nThat\u2019s why mainstream economics tends to minimize or ignore the messier domains (firm strategy, R&D, workforce development). These don\u2019t fit neatly into models, so they fall outside the sacred circle of the \u201cscientific.\u201d Yet in practice, they\u2019re exactly what determines whether a society thrives.<\/p>\n