Economists' solutions can be disastrous

I'm writing this at 585,000 worldwide active cases, 26,000 deaths, and with only China and South Korea seemingly under some sort of control (using a social metric tool, Worldometer). The stimulus package announced by the US government is at $2 trillion, but without job protections, rent freezes, or meaningful income support for most people. Where to reach for analogies to help us understand the moment? The AIDS crisis? The 2008 economic crisis? SARS?

Every analogy can capture a part of the story. On March 23, US President Donald Trump floated the idea of sending everyone back to work within weeks, ignoring the advice of public health scientists. This echoed Jair Bolsonaro's denialism in Brazil and Boris Johnson's early talk of seeking "herd immunity" by "taking it on the chin," which his ministers walked back a few days later. On this specific issue, the prioritizing of economic projections over scientific ones, there is one clear analogy with the last great empire: the British Empire, with its special penchant for the mass starvation of millions.

As the British Empire expanded in the 18th century, its intellectuals developed the perfect set of ideas for an empire: classical economics. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, after numerous genocidal wars against indigenous peoples in the Americas and at the beginning of the Empire in India.

David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill all made their contributions to the classical theory. As soon as the imperialists consolidated their control, they dismantled local governmental systems for preventing mass starvation and the famines across India began. Shashi Tharoor listed them in his book Inglorious Empire: starting with Bengal in 1770, and on to Madras, Delhi and Bombay through 1943. In the 20th century alone, 35 million people were killed by British-administered famine in India.

In the name of the same doctrines, the British also starved the Irish. The potato famine of 1845-49 fell in this period, and the Irish were victims of the same doctrines. Edward O'Boyle in 2006 linked classical economics to the Irish famine and identified the tenets of classical economics as: 1. the law of self-interest; 2. the law of free competition; 3. the law of population; 4. the law of demand and supply; 5. the iron law of wages; 6. the law of rent; and 7. the free-trade doctrine.

Taken together, these laws, as critic Karl Polanyi wrote of the selfadjusting market, "could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness."

During one of the many Indian famines (Southern India, 1876-78), the British viceroy Lord Lytton declared, "there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of government with the object of reducing the price of food." Johann Hari tells the story of one British official, Sir Richard Temple, who, when he imported some food to give to the starving during another famine, was denounced by the Economist magazine for giving Indians the notion that "it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive."

During that empire, classical economic theory and famine combined seamlessly with racism in a toxic brew. O'Boyle quotes an 1875 lecture by classical economist William Stanley Jevons: "a famine comes to be looked upon as a kind of natural event … war is … a normal state of things, in early societies. The North American Indians, for example, their only serious occupation, their only amusement, was war … the way the Irish live, especially, in some of our large towns and in some parts of their own country, makes it a priori probable that they die fast."

The British had an empire of famine. We live in an empire of sanctions. As Iran, Venezuela and Gaza crack under the simultaneous strain of pandemic and siege, diplomats beg the US to suspend the sanctions until the current crisis passes. To no avail: Remote-control mass murder is too solid a plank of US policy to be suspended over something so small as a global pandemic.

To what extent has economics been refined over the centuries? To what extent has it become more rooted in evidence? An abundance of literature from scholars just outside of mainstream economics argues, "not very much."

Back in 2001, heterodox economist James Galbraith wrote an article listing five widely accepted propositions of today's economics profession ("Inflation is … a monetary phenomenon"; "Full employment without inflation is impossible"; "Rising pay inequality stems from technological change"; "Rising minimum wages cause unemployment"; "Sustained growth cannot exceed 2.5% per year").