[NB: I tried to post this yesterday (early morning for most of you folks), but the system was down and wouldn’t let me. I’m only posting it now for reference purposes: take it or leave it for what it’s worth: it’s backstory to the thread.]
Economics is not beyond any brain, especially a thinking one. What’s passed of as economics these days – a sort of over-mathematized shell game sleight of hand – is, and should be for the only thing we need to know about it is that it must go, and thankfully it is, but not fast enough, but maybe we can’t handle a faster transition.
Should you want to back-fill or establish some kind of foundation in your economic thinking (for we all think economically at times), I would suggest Heilbronner’s The Worldly Philosophers, but you should also be warned that economics wasn’t dubbed “the dismal science” for nothing.
Both Adam Smith and Marx are worthy reads (but only if you have plenty of free time). Smith’s Wealth of Nations is not really understandable if you haven’t read his Theory of Moral Sentiments first (he was, after all a moral philosopher and thinks of “economics” in terms of interaction with others against the backdrop of merchant capitalism (not industrial or post-industrial (“cognitive”) economics mentioned in Mason’s article). (Fun fact: the most-quoted Smith phrase, “the invisible hand”, appears once in the 1000±page tome WoN, and, yes, he says it in passing … hardly something to base an economic school of thought on). Marx is interesting not for what the Leninists and Stalinists tried to make out of him, but – and this was pointed out in the Mason article as well – but for his lesser-known works. Both Smith and Marx are on my list of most-misquoted writers.
For a thoughtful and prescient view of why industrial capitalism will implode, I’d recommend Kerenyi’s The Great Transformation. It also makes clear how utterly insane our current flavor of capitalism, which can only be called “predatory”, is. A good look at the later phases of this can be found in Graeber’s (menitioned in the article) Debt: The First 5000 Years", (another tome – almost 400 pages, not counting the 60 double-columned pages of notes that are also worth reading). I think Graeber clearly exposes post-capitalism for what it is: a sham.
There are on the so-called “other side” a number of worthwhile reads as well. Shumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, springs to mind (he worked closely with Gandhi for a long time), but also Breton & Largent’s (I would suspect widely unknown) The Soul of Economies which proposes an alternative approach based on the six days of creation (Genesis), the 10 Commandments, (and my favorite addition) the Beatitudes, and the Lord’s Prayer. (Sounds weird or flaky perhaps, but I spent an hour-and-a-half on the phone with Largent shortly after publication, and he made a very sane and serious impression.) Moving into the current millennium, you could also try Handy’s The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism – A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World. And on the more practical side of things, just about anything by Gar Aperowitz, who is very readable and doesn’t require a pseudo-degree in economics to understand what he’s saying.
We’re all touched and influenced by “economics” and we all get a much better and faster grip on it when we realize that this is a discipline that (allegedly) thinks about human interaction, how we choose to deal with and engage “an Other”. When you’ve got that in the back of your mind, it becomes very, very clear just how contrived most “economic thinking” is. It is something we simply made up, it is our most pervasive human brainchild. It is anything but a science, and it is, I believe, changeable with a lot less pain than many “in the field” would have us believe. I think Mason is saying something very similar.
Just my nickel’s worth.