So I’ve been doing research on how certain ideas develop and then dominate the discourse, squeezing out all others. I doubt I’ll ever publish it. It’s just for my own interest. It’s the kind of thing I do all the time in one way or another, but I’m not an academic so no one will care even if the scholarship is excellent, anyway. (Wouldn’t a world without pervasive credentialism be nice?)
But I’ve been skimming through or sometimes reading dozens of older economics books to trace the genesis and development of ideas over time. I classify any economics books over twenty years old as “older” for my purposes.
Noticed this today in The Next Twenty-five Years of Public Choice, Charles K. Rowley, Friedrich Schneider (auth.), Charles K. Rowley, Friedrich Schneider, Robert D. Tollison (eds.) as a chapter title:
“Health care, education and the cost disease: A looming crisis for public choice”
So I read a little. Here’s what I found.
If the citizens of these countries are willing to do what is necessary for the supply of educational, health care and other related services to keep up with the expansion in overall economic output made possible by rising productivity, then, if my analysis is correct, a difficult choice will be required: either ever more of gross national product will have to be channeled through the public sector, with all the problems we know that to entail; or, alternatively, these services will have to be transferred to private enterprise, in fields where private business firms can hope to succeed only if granted an (improbably) immunity from the temptation of unwise governmental interference.
Nice false dichotomy the author has going there.
But it was indeed an accurate prediction and creation of the future; that is exactly what happened. (Of course to some extent it was already occurring, but has greatly accelerated since 1993.)
You lost me at “public choice.” Seriously, though, I always thought the very invention of “public choice theory” was some kind of astroturf stunt. Back in the old, old days people studied a discipline called “political economy,” and I think the study of that has probably done the world some good. I suspect the people who invented public choice theory are the same people who pried economics apart from political economy a generation or two earlier (or are the intellectual and ideological heirsof such people; basically the think tank crowd). “Public choice theory” seems to combine polly sigh and eecon, but on eecon’s terms, making polly sigh out to be a branch of eecon, with economic models being the model of all behavior of all phenomena both economic and non-economic, from politics to biology to physics. A chilling example of this is the last chapter (titled “Thinking like an economist” or something) of a polemic disguised as a textbook titled Price Theory by Steven Langham.
Lori — yes, one of the reasons I was examining that book in particular is that I was attempting to trace the evolution and subsequent takeover of all spheres of life that previously were governed by other overarching domains of thought and practice, and how economics — particularly neoliberal eocnomics — came to define nearly all human relations that had previously been seen as firmly outside that sphere.
I’m not particularly concerned with neoliberal economics per se, but rather how certain ideas come to completely dominate thought to such an extent that for most people most of the time, even considering other alternatives is literally impossible as they can’t even think about them — the society and the individual no longer even have a toolkit to consider them as real proposals.
I’m trying to move beyond the rather facile and much more limited “Overton window” and get a grasp on how ideas and thought paradigms are extirpated and how once that occurs, resurrecting them is nearly impossible (though not completely). And also the epistemological underpinnings of “allowable ideas,” for lack of a better term.
I’m interested in the history of idea extinction, in short.