By Michael Hudson

There is a seeming riddle in the recent evolution of economic thought. It has become more otherworldly and abstract, more detached from the reality of how economies are running deeper into debt to a financial oligarchy. The global economy itself is polarizing between creditor and debtor nations, financial core and periphery (even as the United States manages to play both sides of this street). Yet academic orthodoxy treats this as anomalous, side-stepping the two key features of today’s economic crisis: the “magic of compound interest” multiplying debts owed by the bottom 90 percent of the population to savers among the top 10 percent, while industrial capitalism is turned into a “tollbooth economy” by privatizing rent-extracting privileges on what used to be the public domain.

Academic rationalizers of today’s economic policy use models that deny that such as failure could exist in the first place. Yet mathematically inclined economists claim that their discipline has become a science. It may seem natural enough for the hallmark of science to be mathematics, but the real issue should not be universals but rather how nations are diverging economically and how this is a result of policy, not the presumably automatic workings of “free markets.” The mathematical boys confuse social sciences grounded in history and jockeying for political power with the universals of physics. We should be glad that they finally have dropped equilibrium theorizing, but game theory and chaos mathematics still do not address the key causal dynamics at work.

Pseudo-science wielded on behalf of special interests turns mathematical abstraction into a vehicle to strip away what used to be the major concern of classical political economy, and indeed economic reform, over the past two centuries. The aim of classical value and price theory was to isolate land rent, monopoly rent, and financial interest and fees (and “capital” gains) as a free lunch accruing to privilege.

Chicago School practitioners of free-market mathematics crow that “there is no such thing as a free lunch,” distracting attention from economic reality by dropping the history of economic thought and economic history itself from the curriculum. The very idea that there is such a thing as a free lunch is deemed heretical. This idea now governs academic departments and monopolizes the most prestigious economic journals, without publication in which it is difficult for junior faculty ever to rise to tenured positions in their universities. The aim is to censor the perception that today’s economy is all about getting a free lunch by obtaining legal privileges, as exemplified by the recent U.S. health care HMOs, the bailouts over banks deemed “too big to fail” and other beneficiaries of government largesse. Most wealth through the ages has come from privatizing the public domain. Europe’s landed aristocracy descended from the Viking invaders who seized the Commons and levied groundrent. What is not taken physically from the public domain is taken by legal rights: HMO privileges, banking privileges, the rezoning of land, monopoly rights, patent rights everything that falls under the character of economic rent accruing to special privilege, most recently notorious in the post-Soviet kleptocracies, and earlier in the regions of the world colonized by Europe. (The word “privilege” derives from the Latin, meaning “private law,” legis.) These bodies of privilege are what make national economies different from each other. Classical economists, the original “liberals”, were reformers with a political agenda. The “scientific” mathematizers seek to strip away their agenda, above all by exiling the analysis of rent extraction and special privilege to the academic sub-basement of institutionalism, claiming that a sphere of study that is not mathematized cannot claim the mantel of scientific method. The problem with this reactionary stance is that attempts to base economics on the “real” economy focusing on technology and universals are so materialistic as to be non-historical and lacking in the political element of property and finance. By the 1970s, for example, economic observers were talking about the convergence of the Soviet Union and America on the ground that each used virtually the same technology, along with Japan and Western Europe. For that matter, as early as the Bronze Age (3200-1200 BC) the economies of Mesopotamia (Sumer and Babylonia), Egypt, the Indus Valley and other regions all shared a similar technology, but each had entirely different economic and social systems. A “real” economic analysis focusing on their common denominators would miss the distinct ways in which each accumulated wealth in the hands of (or under the management of) a ruling elite different modes of property and finance, and hence with what the classical economists came to classify as “unearned income.” Mathematizing economics and its claims to become a science overlooks these institutional differences, including the land rent and other revenue that John Stuart Mill said landlords made “in their sleep.” What this approach leaves out of account is the social policy wrapping for technology. If we lived back in 1945 and were told of all the marvelous technological breakthroughs of the past half-century, we would imagine that societies would now be living a life of leisure. Why has this not occurred? The reason is largely to be found in the predatory behavior that has enriched the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors.

For classical and Progressive Era economists, the word “reform” meant taxing economic rent or minimizing it. Today it means giving away public enterprise to kleptocrats and political insiders, or simply for indebted governments to conduct a pre-bankruptcy sale of the public domain to buyers (who in turn buy on credit, subtracting their interest payments from their taxable income). The global economy is being “financialized,” not industrialized in the way that most economic futurists anticipated would be the case a century ago.