fluentmundo

"rarely includes any alternative model"? Did you read the piece?

Here is the alternative model proposed by Skidelsky:

"These deep methodological issues do not render economic knowledge utterly useless, Skidelsky suggests. But they do mean economics as we know it may have to be thrown out. [...] We should instead take a more provisional, open, and flexible attitude toward economic phenomena and treat economics as (just) another social science, rather than one supposedly purified of uncertainty by its logical prowess. Concretely, this means we should abandon dreams of an immaculate science of economic life—and stop deferring to those who claim to speak in its name. More abstractly, in place of a discipline that neglects the 'mesoeconomic' level—the institutions, firms, unions, banking systems, social movements, digital platforms, states, and other social entities that shape our behavior—Skidelsky proposes an approach 'which is more modest in its epistemology and richer in its ontology.'"

Are you saying the article didn't mention global warming? You didn't read carefully enough. Climate is one of the things the author accuses the economist Diane Coyle of relegating to the "margin":

"All the same, her title cannot help but evoke other, perhaps more frightening monsters—ecological breakdown, deadly pandemics, secular stagnation, rising inequality, authoritarian resurgence—that her analysis relegates to the margins when it mentions them at all."

In the section on the book by Elizabeth Popp Berman, the author of the piece lays emphasis on the way the "economic style" has been involved in "downplaying, avoiding, exacerbating, and denying" dealing with carbon emissions:

"This was the first step in the marketization of pollution rights that ultimately led to cap-and-trade approaches to ozone regulation; economists would propose the very same approach to climate for years, leading to a spectacular failure of implementation in the United States and negligible impact on emissions in Europe to date. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently reiterated, the costs of this comprehensive failure have been staggering."

No idea where you got the notion that the author is Socrates-bashing or that the author “demands that we cannot ask questions.” The piece is so obviously a love letter to and defense of Socrates! You seem to have completely misread it.

The author obviously thinks persuasion is “a two-way street,” that asking questions is good, and that Socratic dialogue leaves people more enlightened: it helps make their ignorance more precise.

> When you have no choice in the matter, where's the internal conflict?

Uh.... this completely misunderstands like literally everything Sartre wrote, the point of which was that you ALWAYS have a choice.