by Economics as a propaganda device The most serious deficiency of implicit formal theories is that the verbal language disguises the abstractness of the theory … The consequence of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is that the theory looks too convincing to its proponents … He becomes the prisoner of his own logical model and is rendered incapable of seeing reality from any other standpoint … The most widespread example is provided by the neoclassical economists, such as Frank Knight, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Simons, and their present-day followers. These people seemed to think they had penetrated to the very essence of rational human action, and that they knew whatever was knowable about it … In other words, they believed that their abstract
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Economics as a propaganda device
The most serious deficiency of implicit formal theories is that the verbal language disguises the abstractness of the theory … The consequence of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is that the theory looks too convincing to its proponents … He becomes the prisoner of his own logical model and is rendered incapable of seeing reality from any other standpoint …
The most widespread example is provided by the neoclassical economists, such as Frank Knight, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Simons, and their present-day followers. These people seemed to think they had penetrated to the very essence of rational human action, and that they knew whatever was knowable about it … In other words, they believed that their abstract postulates were concrete descriptions of empirical reality … The followers of these economists, the Buchanans and McCord Wrights … are using their implicit formal theory as a propaganda device to support the present capitalist social order.