Or more: what ideology says I and my heirs deserve to continue to be wealthy and in control? Funny how we’re in a Social Darwinist moment as wealth inequality rises again. But I’m sure people couldn’t possibly be working backwards to justify their position. Certainly the wealthy, who fund research, wouldn’t twist a science as pure as economics like they did the soft science biology.
Meanwhile extreme poverty levels have been steadily diminishing and quality-of-life broadly improving. But you're concerned with some people having more money. That is to say, equality of outcome. No safety net would ever be enough for communist ideologues, because results and well-being don't matter. Only ideology, and punishment.
There's a reason would-be socialist states have back-tracked from central control of economy and allowed competition (Lenin did this so quickly in spite of his zeal it would make your head spin). They kept the authoritarianism though. Once those tendrils get in, they're tough to get out. Only a few countries shed that in the 20th century, one of them being South Korea; places that embraced Liberalism, because they had the good fortune to have leaders with sense.
Liberty qua Liberalism is good, and the checks-and-balances are meant to evolve over time. The alternatives are abject failures, and you'll propose nothing that hasn't been one.
What does that have to do with whether or not economists are serving a useful role day-to-day? For instance, most economists now agree most economists were wrong about the way to respond to 2008, and the austerity measures actually caused more pain for most people. Seems like exactly the sort of recent failure which should make us question their current advice. Especially if the current advice benefits the folks paying their salary.
Regardless, I stand by my derogatory comments about social Darwinists.
Because yours was just a thinly veiled comment on Capitalism, dressed up as one about Economists.
> the austerity measures actually caused more pain for most people
You're thinking of the Great Depression, not the Great Recession. Have you looked up just how much the U.S. government spent in that time? The bailouts, etc? This was not austerity.
My criticism is most definitely of economics as a field and is a common topic among economists today as they reckon with their failures post-2008. Economists do not all agree on everything.
I am most definitely thinking of the Great Recession which I lived through. I encourage you to research the low growth era that followed and what economists think now. You won't have to go far back because five years ago when the pandemic started there was a lot of writing about the failings of that era. In fact, the consensus seems to be we over-corrected this time, but still better than what we did in 2008. But yes, we made the investors who created the mess whole while making the American citizens eat the costs. It's a bit baffling to have something so widely written about dismissed so confidently by someone who doesn't seem to understand what we are even discussing.
