Economists and society

Stanislaw Ponte Preta recorded in the pages of his Festival de Nonsense Que Assola o País ( Febeapá ) a dialogue between two invisible production assistants of a television program that aired, probably, in February 1967, with the purpose of promoting Cruzeiro Novo, part of the monetary reform of the already appointed president Costa e Silva.

Stanislaw verifies the disconnect between the object of economic analysis and the common and invisible beings subject to the advice of Old Science:

"After the Minister of Planning finished his televised talk... talking about frivolous arithmetic, the economic situation, monetary contraction and other things," the Minister leaves the scene accompanied by his cronies, and the invisible ones enter.

Stanislaw noticed and noted:

“The tallest one, white and with a small mustache, very close to the thin one, asked: — Did you understand anything that guy said?

And, before the other's lost look: — This guy who explained the new Cruzero?

The other, who was about the round, convinced Creole and more relaxed manner, replied:

— At first, I paid attention. Then I didn't live with it anymore and asked for my cap.

— Well, look, from what I heard, those who were rich got richer; those who were poor got poorer!

— Don't tell me! – and the black boy widened his eyes: — You must have misunderstood. I can't stand being poorer than I am.” (sic)

This episode provokes us to the boldness of recording some of the economic improprieties that plague our times.

Undefeated, in the practice of dogmatic positivism and proud of their prominent positions and the adornments offered by the illustrated media, our economists have specialized in the office that previously belonged to the prophets, as guardians of the laws that govern the individual and collective behavior of invisible men and women, existing at the atomic level, as raw materials for scientists busy studying the allocation of scarce resources, as defined by Paul Samuelson in his Foundations, a kind of catechesis for generations of young economists that gained great fame among our Brazilian exemplars.

The difficulties in dealing with the demon of money and radical uncertainty keep them from victory over the real world.

Gustavo Franco , in his quasi-autobiography entitled Letters to a Young Economist, takes care to engage in an imaginary dialogue with aspiring and lay people interested in the Dismal Science, the so-called Economics.

We ask Mr. Franco's permission to use his Augustinian exercise regarding the concerns of economists:

"Our subject is how groups of people act when it comes to decisions that affect their material conditions of existence. The noblest subject—or at least the most popular among us economists—is the collective. This concerns so-called social economic behavior... it is the logic of collective action, or group behavior, which reveals a rationality inherent to the group, which, in turn, is not merely the sum of its individuals, but something much larger and, therefore, very different from its components."

Here it is worth inquiring into the conscience of economists about what the social is, an eccentric concept that tirelessly disturbs philosophers and historians.

Discomforting with the trappings of classical utilitarianism and abandoned by the doctrine of laissez-faire , the prophets of Old Science resisted the Keynesian apostasy of the post-war period and sought to transcend the simplicity of their classical and neoclassical predecessors. On their pilgrimage in search of the Grail of Science, they found renewed comfort in expectations theories (first adaptive, then rational), in dynamic stochastic models of general equilibrium, and in their meager forays into dynamic systems theory.

When it comes to managing the functioning of the economy as a whole, that is, so-called macroeconomic issues, the vices of common sense and individualistic microcephaly lead to suicidal economic policy recommendations. In this apologetic view, the "aggregation" of rational individual behaviors, the sum of the parts, determines the outcome for the economy as a whole. It is no coincidence that mainstream economists strive strenuously to discover the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics, just as alchemists sought the philosopher's stone. This intellectual feat aims to convince the unwary that the movement of the "macro" is the result of the aggregation of decisions at the "micro" level.

Poincaré. Humiliated by the mathematician's boldness, they took refuge in the assumption of monetary neutrality – Image: Senate Library/USA

Humiliated by the boldness of Poincaré, responsible for proving the analytical and predictive limitations of differential calculus, monetarists, new-classicals and tutti quanti wrapped their theorems in the comfortable assumptions of the neutrality of money and the fixation of time as a special property of dynamic spaces, which, curiously, insist on remaining static.

The difficulties in dealing with the demon of money and radical uncertainty, conditions for the existence of human sociability, persist in keeping economists from victory over the real world.

The social, or collectivity, was embraced, within the scope of Economics, by the gelatinous concept of the group—a discrete variable that dispenses with the evaluation of human subjectivities and can be infinitely divided down to the atomic or individual level—or of representative groups of individuals who share similarities and common interests, acting cooperatively (or not). Group and individual action, certainly rational and unpredictable, is guided by the common language of prices, an impersonal and inexorable form of welding economic behavior, or so-called… or cursed, social behavior.

In practicing good economic technique, experts have remained equidistant from politics and social theory.

Mainstream metaphysics and epistemology conceal an economic ontology that postulates a certain conception of the mode of being, a vision of the structure and connections of capitalist mercantile society. For this paradigm, the society in which economic action unfolds is constituted by the aggregation of individuals, interconnected by external and unnecessary connections.

Prices participate in this social process as a ratification of an elementary fact, inescapable to participants, as an immanent revelation of reality. Franco, rehashing Milton Friedman's free lunch motto, draws on Machado de Assis to explain that "you can't go to Glória without paying the tram," a law imposed by the scarcity of resources. This social being, as a solitary unit of a collective, or a part that solitarily activates its cooperative egoism, receives the gift of freedom of choice, casually restricted by scarcity.

The sayings and knowledge of the Science of Enrichment (or Chrematistics, as the Greeks preferred) inform the predominance of the method and its purity, carrying in its peculiar ontology the anchors of naturalism, rationalism, individualism and balance, which act in the subterranean of ideas, as a scientific way of politically justifying the exploits of capitalism.

Sartre. Subjects guided by the purity and passivity of instrumental reason are practical-inert – Image: National Portrait Gallery/London

In practicing sound economic technique, experts maintain an equidistant distance from both politics and the speculations and magic of social theory, fixated on the center of its positivist bias. Jean-Paul Sartre defined subjects guided by the purity and passivity of instrumental reason as practical-inerts. These beings think they have ideas, but it is ideas that possess them and, not infrequently, act as powerful devices of political hegemony.

“Technical” economists, on the one hand, act to reiterate the notion of the social being as a product (and producer) of choices restricted to the balance of forces between needs and the meritorious distribution of wealth and, on the other, comfort the hearts of men and women deprived of the autonomy to satisfy their (terribly) human needs which, in the “balance,” are full and unrestricted for a few who enjoy abundance, and little or none for all the others shackled to the shackles of scarcity.

Economists' recommendations and analyses (including our own), even when rendered in good faith, are riddled with undisclosed assumptions and valuations, not to mention displays of rigor and scientificity that are incompatible with the nature of the object under investigation. This incident, the disagreement between the method of investigation and the nature of the object under investigation, is almost always ignored by practitioners of Sad Science. This does not necessarily cast doubt on the intellectual honesty of economists, but it does force them to make explicit the "visions" (as Schumpeter put it) that precede and underlie their analyses. These precautions become even more imperative when the wisdom of vested interests subjugates the interests of knowledge.

Published in issue no. 1377 of CartaCapital , on September 3, 2025.

This text appears in the print edition of CartaCapital under the title 'Economists and society'