There is a sense among economists, I would propose, that they constitute a latter-day priestly class ruling over the destiny of civilization regardless of who sits on the throne of overt political power, thus that the priestly (economist) class is above the political class. This priestly economist class sees itself as responsible for the steering of society in the right direction, as responsible for pleasing the gods, for performing the proper rituals, for overseeing that the holy teachings be obeyed to a sufficient degree that the good times go on and the wrath of the gods be averted.
This priestly class has its own debates over theological specifics: The long-dominant faction within the priestly class holds to the doctrine of salvation through “unlimited growth through free markets and technology.” Different subfactions propose different paths for how this exactly works.
In the dominant view today, as I understand it, salvation comes through the noble efforts of that chosen few who “work in the field of ideas.” It is this special group that increases economic growth forever and delivers us from the evil of Malthus’ imagination. Economists propose that a society can (through policy) allocate workers into one of two fields: “creation of objects” (‘doers’) versus “creation of ideas” (‘thinkers’). The “ideas people” actually do not create any wealth/output at all for the time being, but spend their time thinking of new ideas. Their continual thinking of ideas constitutes, in effect, a spiritual exercise akin to monks praying on a mountaintop. The ideas people produce a certain small number of good ideas which take hold. These lay the groundwork for growth in the future, years or decades later. The fewer people “working in ideas,” the lower the long-term growth. Thus society needs to encourage more people to work in the field of ideas.
Another faction, out of fashion among the high priestly class, rejects the tenet of maximization of growth as the animating civilizational goal in the first place. They say that economies tending towards a “steady state” may be inevitable, and may not even be a bad thing.
When allegorized as a priestly ruling elite’s efforts to steer the course of civilization and internal debates about how to do it, economics sounds exciting, The study of economics as I have known it is rather not like this. I have known it as a drab muddling through of a series of manipulations of highly abstract equations and graphs. One must memorize them.
I can’t help but think economics (as I have known it, September 2016 to Present) amounts to the learning of a little code language that one will never use again (i.e., inevitably forgotten soon after the final exam), something like learning a foreign or dead language to read one’s religion’s holy scriptures (to touch back on the allegory). The kind of equation-manipulations I mean look like this:
That is pure gibberish to most of us. Perhaps a foreign language in some unknown script…
As for unlimited growth forever: It does seem to be the way we see the world. It does seem to inform everything else we think, we ‘modern’ (and ‘postmodern’) people. It seems to have been so for generations, even centuries. Since when? I suppose since the Industrial Revolution in earnest, maybe with origins in the Enlightenment. It is tempting to believe it, too, for one thing because it seems true from empirical data for more than two centuries now in the West.
I perceive that more have been questioning this model in recent decades, for various reasons: Unlimited growth forever? What does that mean? Are we sure it’s true? Is it not folly to assume that trends in the age of cheap fossil-fuel energy will hold true forever? Are we sure we even want unlimited growth forever?
But this “dissident faction” still remains on the margins (really it is several factions united by some kind of opposition to, or skepticism of, the long-reigning Unlimited Growth Forever idea). The dissident voices are just more conspicuous than before. A quip from the 1970s:
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell
captures a main current of this dissident view.