Is Mainstream Economics a Slave Morality?: An Analysis of the Longstanding Anomalies of Mainstream Economics within the Evolutionary Framework of Multiple Moralities

Abstract

The same stubborn anomalies have plagued mainstream economics for multiple decades, despite available correction and amendment. We argue this perplexing situation has arisen because each anomaly, despite an apparent illogic, has practical utility as a rhetorical instrument of real world interests. Rhetorical instruments may elicit a set of behaviors desired of the believer that true theory would not. They may be strategically deployed whenever an actor in the real world wishes to elicit the behaviors in question of another actor. First, we show how the theoretical function of each anomaly may be explained from this perspective with standard economics theory. Then, we show how the whole of the theoretical and real discussion of anomaly in mainstream economics may be encompassed within a single framework, that of evolutionary multiple moralities. In practical life, economics divides asymmetrically into three moralities: A national economics, an imperial economics, and a slave economics. Mainstream economics—in prescribing a uniformly passive and concessionary agenda—fits the outward form of the last.