Critics of Economics Fight a War That Ended Long Ago

Each year brings a reliable drumbeat of broadsides against the economics profession in the popular press. This year’s standout is an op-ed by anthropologist David Graeber in the New York Review of Books. Like its many predecessors, Graeber’s article gets a few things right and a lot of things wrong about the failings of economics and its role in the modern world.

Like many of his fellow critics, Graeber focuses almost entirely on one particular branch of economics -- business cycle theory, which occupies a small niche in the broad field of economics. A list of all the other topics economists study would be too long for one column, but it includes things like inequality, economic mobility, wage policy, taxation, unions, health, education, poverty, economic development, race, gender and a vast host of other things that are important to people’s lives and livelihoods. To ignore these as Graeber does, and to declare economics “no longer fit for purpose” because of the shortcomings of business cycle theory, is like declaring biology obsolete because of the failure to cure cancer.