The Undead World of Mainstream Economics

Ben Fine ()
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Ben Fine: Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, UK

No 206, Working Papers from Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, UK

Abstract: I first put forward the idea of zombieconomics in 2008, to reflect two fundamental aspects of mainstream economics in appealing to the metaphor with the monster genre. One is what I have termed one-dimensions economics; it is not just that it is one-dimensional but it collapses structured determinations of economy and society, and their meanings, into a number of single, simultaneous dimensions such as the interaction of supply and demand. The exact content of this parallel with the flat motives and movements of zombies is drawn out in section 2 alongside an account of how this condition came about. The second aspect in deployment of the zombie metaphor is the way in which mainstream economics has infected not only the study of the economy at the expense of other livelier and multi-faceted schools of thought (generally gathered under the term heterodox) but has also increasingly extended its influence over social science more generally, in what is termed economics imperialism. This monstrous extension from the economic to the social is covered in section 3. In section 4, I offer some observations on how zombieconomics has responded to the Global Financial Crisis, GFC, in ways that equally reflect the continuing momentum of the zombie genre.

Keywords: Critique of mainstream economics; monster genre (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B0 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16
Date: 2017-12
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