CriticalThinkingAcademy

In the first two parts of this blog series, I explained why supply side economics is theoretically and empirically weak. I then discussed why the ideology persists within the public. I want to be a tad bit more rigorous in this post. I've alluded to the fact that supply-side economics is normally combined with austerity policies. We also introduced market fundamentalism; the extension of neoliberal market ideologies to all facets of life. In this post, I will treat all of these concepts as equivalent, and we will construct a system dynamics model that encapsulates some of the causal forces introduced last post. Here we will introduce the Atlas Network and the State Policy Network (SPN) ; two organizations that act as the "think tanks" for "think tanks". They are essentially hubs in a network that are basically infrastructure for market fundamentalism – not just on narrow tax policy, but across austerity, neoliberal “reforms,” climate inaction, and libertari...

In the first post, I gave a systematic explanation as to why I think supply side economics should be rejected on theoretical and empirical grounds. In this second post, I want to discuss why I think the ideology persists among the public despite the near consensus among economists of its vacuousness. I think there is a very plausible historical and cultural backstory that can explain why supply-side / "free market" ideology is so entrenched in public discourse. In addition, there are readily identifiable causal mechanisms that can explain how the ideology diffuses through social networks. So in this post, we will discuss both of these, given the background knowledge of the first post. The Origins of Market Fundamentalism It's not an accident that certain economic beliefs tend to cluster around certain religious beliefs. It's also not an accident that certain responses to policy are entirely predictable by certain groups. It's also not an accident that anti-...