THE BIG MYTH

A thoughtful denunciation of the economic dogma that the market knows best.

“How did so many Americans come to have so much faith in markets and so little faith in government?” So ask Oreskes and Conway, continuing the line of research they began in their seminal 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt. Where that book focused on the co-optation of scientists to dispute the realities of climate change and the linkage of tobacco to cancer, this joins that co-optation to carefully planted “free market” fundamentalism that holds that any attempt to regulate business is a form of tyranny. This dogma was fomented by economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, who argued that market efficiency was the sine qua non of freedom, as if efficiency were the only dimension of an economy. Oreskes and Conway argue convincingly that this ideology “denies capitalism’s failures and refuses to endorse the best tool we have to address those failures, which is government.” The demand for an unregulated economy precedes the Chicago School of economics, of course: As the authors note, business leaders vehemently objected to child labor laws more than 100 years ago, using the familiar argument that such laws should be left to the states. The National Association of Manufacturers, formed to resist such regulation, pressed the argument that humans were naturally unequal and that neither the government nor business was responsible for leveling the playing field. “Even today,” write the authors, “NAM continues to fight workplace safety regulation and stands with the fossil fuel industry in its attempts to escape accountability for climate change caused by its products.” Other entities foster this denialism and economic inequality, from the Federal Reserve and its “pursuit of low inflation, rather than low unemployment, [as] the nation’s primary goal” to libertarian think tanks at universities around the country that preach the government-bad, market-good ideology.

A timely, well-argued contribution to the literature of economic inequality and regulation.