Rationality and Ideology

Entering the economic debate as a philosopher, what appears obvious to me is the erroneous presumption (hidden assumption) that this appraoch to rationality entails. The assumption that there is a representative (universal) rational agent further assumes that there is only one universe of discourse operative and that all share the same worldview (in Wittgenstein's sense) that it describes and delimits through its norms. This worldview is a logical construct of "reality."

That is patently not the case as wide ideological disagreement shows. People, including economists who are supposedly "scientists," disagree not only over norms but also what the facts may be, because "facts" don't exist independently as "things" but rather are structured in terms of the manner of approach. Difference in worldview result in different ways of structuring facts in that the difference of worldviews are observable in terms of different rules and their application, for instance, criteria.

Although I think this is the beginning of the matter, I don't think that this is the end of the matter, in that there are a lot of other issues with "rationality," too. But this is one that I seldom see even brought up, even though it should be obvious that economics can be viewed as a struggle among competing ideologies and the worldviews they entail. If this were not the case, then a "scientific" resolution would be possible and there would be a Kuhnian normal paradigm in economics. But that is not the case as far as I can see as an observer.

Orthodox attempts to sustain the claim that it's paradigm is normal and everything else is "heterodox," but I don't see that case being made successfully at all, especially when heterodox economists predicted the crisis and orthodox economists not only did not but claim that it is not possible, failing to add, in the "normal' paradigm. That should call the "normal" paradigm into question, but they will not admit that. This is an indication of adherence to ideological norms over feedback for experience.

Note: I posted this a comment at Lars Syll's blog here, but it stands alone, too.

Lars responds:

I can’t but agree, Tom. Neoclassical economics has been tremendously successful in usurping words like “rational” and “effective”, loaded them with very special meanings and relying on people not wanting to be considered as “irrational” or “inefifcient” thinking the economics-meaning of the terms are he same as the common sense meaning. Amartya Sen has done a tremendous job on this.

Yes, a further criticism is that the economics debate in general presupposes capitalism and the assumptions of capitalism about what is "natural." This is taken as self-evident, other than in Marxism, Marxian economics, PROUT, and other non-capitalistic or post-capitalistic schools.

Interestingly, "Christian Economics" is a label that is also used by Religious-Right Libertarians. See Gary North, An Introduction to Christian Economics