Things to not criticise economics about

At the Unlearning Economics blog some advice is given on How Not to Criticise Economics. The advice is don't,

Criticising early assumptions

Don’t get me wrong, criticising economist’s perversion of the use of assumptions is fair game. However, critics often go down the path of criticising ’pure rationality’ or ‘perfect information.’ Whilst these are elements of core models (and these models should be attacked because of this, but with the caveat that the core models are the target), they are generally not found in the higher echelons of economics. Many of these assume imperfect information, bounded rationality, and can also incorporate other biases.

Most specifically, idea that economic theory assumes everybody is a selfish, emotionless self-maximiser is common trope, but as Chris Dillow noted in the link above, it’s not entirely true. More importantly, it is also defensible as an assumption – a heuristic by which to approximate behaviour, at least until something better comes along. It is important to distinguish between good and bad assumptions from a scientific standpoint, rather than how absurd they appear to be at first glance.

Equilibrium

Many critics of economics, including well-informed ones, make the mistake of arguing that economics always assumes the economy is in equilibrium, tending to equilibrium, oscillating closely around equilibrium, or something along these lines. It is true that many economic models do this; it is also true that economic models start from the assumption that the economy is in equilibrium, and see what happens from there. However, economists generally mean something very different to other scientists when they say equilibrium. From the horse’s mouth:

An equilibrium in an economic model is characterized by two basic conditions which hold in all of the model’s time periods: i) all agents in the model solve the maximization problems implied by their preferences, resource constraints, information sets, etc; and ii) markets for all goods in the model “clear.” An equilibrium is not a snapshot of the model economy at one point in time. Instead, it is the model’s entire time path.

Even on first inspection, this type of equilibrium clearly has problems of its own, but I will save them for another post. The important thing to remember is that this, rather than a stable state, is what economists often mean when they talk about equilibrium.

Economist’s Political Beliefs

Economists are not all free marketeers – in fact, they generally lean to the left. Neoclassical economics, broadly speaking, concludes that we should: regulate oligopolies, monopolies and banking; do more to protect the environment and intervene in the case of other externalities; have some public provision of health, education and welfare; and as that survey shows, economists are generally approving of things such as safety regulations.

As I have said before, I think economic theory as taught lends itself to being used by free marketeers, because of the way the ‘market’ is presented as natural and the government ‘intervenes.’ I also object to the fact that economics applies the same analysis to every market from apples to education to labour. And it is true that the market is presented as generally equilibrating and efficient, except in a few choice cases. However, the impact of these things is not that all economists support ‘right wing’ policy prescriptions, but that neoclassical theory can generally be coopted to provide justification for them.

My only comment would be with the political beliefs comment. There is nothing in neoclassical economics which is "right wing", as it is put. In fact what caused the break between the Austrian school and the neoclassical school was the use by the socialists during the socialist calculation debate of the neoclassical model (standard GE) to argue that market socialism would work. Put simply they replaced the auctioneer with the central planner and showed that everything worked very nicely. Thus the neoclassical model looks very left wing,

Will our anti-economics friends at The Standard take the advice?