Anti-capitalist values and its ideological paradox in Western Economics studies: alternative socio-economic analysis to the Neoclassical Synthesis and its WASP trap

Abstract

It seems that as much wealth there is in a Western country, more interventionist the economists become, distrusting the principles, institutions, and mentality (values included), these favored the progress (the wealth and wellbeing generated), in order to replace voluntary social coordination (by the invisible hand and spontaneous order) with a coercive state design (by the visible fist), with the aim of redistributing existing wealth and ensuring the stability of the system. This is the anti-capitalist ideological paradox and its value inversion, and the Neoclassical Synthesis (NS) and its model of state welfare economy (SWE) respond to this approach. For more than half a century, it has spread in the West as the mainstream vision in curricula (at Economics and Business Schools) and in professional practice, offering replicable engineering recipes for modeling and optimizing economic activity (for its prediction and better exploitation), albeit from the point of view of Protestant-Nordic (WASP), which tends to determinism, utilitarianism and replication, and only it is viable in environments with high rates of certainty and stability (initiated with the rise of the nation-state, its periods of peace and the consolidation of industrial and technological revolutions). Thus, with NS & SWE (after World War II), Economics was transformed from a social science into a kind of social engineering, through the promotion of econometrics over economic theory, normative economics over positive economics, and by intensifying the justification of public intervention due to a distrust of free will (conversely, from a Southern Catholic perspective, the School of Salamanca analyzed subjective valuations and free exchanges for the fair formation of prices and the functioning of markets). The Social Sciences have considered all of this flawed, instead of conceiving it as a complex system guided by continuous information on revealed preferences that direct production and distribution to increase real wealth and wellbeing. Thus, with NS & SWE, politics took precedence over Economics, relegating the latter to the instrumental condition of ancilla politicae of the contemporary Deus ex machina (the State, as a colossal and thaumaturgical myth, of superior bureaucratic rationality against the animal spirits of individuals, plus its narrative of power over welfare and social security). This work condenses the explanation of how and why such a set of problems occurs within the field of Economics (transmutation, instrumentalization, disaffection, etc.), especially in the educational and sociocultural sphere, whose common point is the expansion of the anti-capitalist mentality implanted in its studies and intensified with the interventionism of NS & SWE (given their tendency towards modeling designed from outside and increasingly distant from reality and economic principles, in favor of politics), and how it affects the deterioration of economic activity, the level of wealth and the socioeconomic conditions of a country (i.e., side effects such as making those who had been prosperous poorer and more dependent, by blurring the conditions that drove their progress, such as a large middle class thanks to the social mobility of capitalism, as well as reliable institutions and favorable values ​​and attitudes). To carry out the analysis, the theoretical and methodological frameworks of alternative schools (to NS) are used, considered heterodox today, despite being prior to and rooted in the marginalist revolution, with their subjective values ​​and economic principles, thus allowing the provision of opinions and solutions more in line with reality and its needs (i.e., dealing with environments of greater risk, uncertainty and complexity).