Governance Unboxed (for Dummies, not for Dumbs) Economic policies are based on political power, not economic science
Mythology and, beg your pardon, the mythomania of governments – this being the case everywhere and since forever – maintain the idea that the solutions for the peace and prosperity of the polis somehow come “from above”: either from the heights of the skies (descending from the divinity and transmitted, through epiphanies, to the priests), or from the heights of the sciences (processed by gifted brains, organs that are in the custody of the scholars). Am I insinuating that this is not how things are?! To be honest, if I can’t really say anything useful about the first route, because my own heavenly revelation is still waiting to be experienced, about the second I can say that it is a huge hoax: an erroneous interpretation, which can degenerate into a… fraudulent one, of the area of sciences – economic and political ones alike.
One of the most scrupulously invoked “conceptual delimitations” encountered by political scientists and economists alike, is that between politics and policy. (It’s a good thing the Romanian language didn’t fall for the trick of a poor “distinction without a difference” – there is one word only, “politică”). We have been taught: in the sense of politics, we are talking about the activities of the government, but also of citizens in general, intended to influence the way in which, for example, a country is governed; while in the sense of policy, we are referring to a plan of action or set of rules through which a certain situation is managed. So, in a democracy, politics would be the one that guides policies, mediated by the popular vote. And yet, crediting the real political action with “scientistic compass” is at least suspicious if not outright… surreal.
Beyond the “romanticized” political literature, there are plenty of signs that draw attention to this mystification. For instance, in Great Transformations, Mark Blyth dismantles this fiction, showing that economic policies are not the result of neutral expertise, but of the struggle for power and ideological hegemony. Peter A. Hall, in Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State, echoes this, albeit adding some nuance, observing a complex interplay between “powering” (we would translate it as some sort of “game of thrones”, fuelled by interests) and “puzzling” (read as social astonishment, witnessed in the face of omnipresent uncertainty) in policy-making. Not last, Dani Rodrik, in Economics Rules, plainly admits that economics proposes contradictory models – and the choice between them is not “scientific”, but political.
The fears related to bringing science as a conscripted combatant on the battlefield of political power are trans-ideological. For example, although they seem to come from different planets, post-modern Michel Foucault and new (not neo-) classical Ludwig von Mises sound the same alarm signal: when politics puts on its doctor’s gown, society starts coughing. If the “leftish” Foucault, in The Birth of Biopolitics, deconstructs the myth of “neutral” governance, showing how economic expertise becomes a weapon of social control, albeit a soft one, the “rightish” Mises, in his (epistemically) revolutionary treatise Human Action, along with the warning that economics is not a branch of physics, implies that budgetary or monetary decisions cannot be extracted from maths-engineered formulas. Except as “displays of force”. Ironically, physical.
Similar echoes also appear in the duet/duel Karl Polanyi vs. Friedrich A. Hayek. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi suggests that the “free market” did not emerge naturally, but was (oppressively) imposed, while Hayek, in The Fatal Conceit, thunders against those who believe they can design society with a pencil on a flipchart. But both reject the illusion of “scientific” decision-making: Polanyi because it hides institutional violence, Hayek because the planner’s ignorance makes it wrong. Once again, two intellectuals with different polarities converge in dismantling the same illusion: the omniscient technocrat (en)able(d) to decide for everyone (else). So, when ideological opponents play the same refrain, it seems appropriate to “put it on repeat”, even at the risk of ear bleeds. We then see which orchestration/demonstration we love.
Science – including economics – does not exist to give orders to governments, but to ask uncomfortable questions and expose the consequences. For instance, in 2025 Romania, following a year of electoral heat, spending hypes and hybrid warfare on democracy, we heard the governmental stiff appeals to “economic reason” to take “responsible measures” – such as layoffs, cuts in social spending, postponement of public investment, tax increases. However, invoking “econometric models”, “European recommendations” and “fiscal needs” as scientific benchmarks for their crusade is insincere. Scientifically, the diagnostic is simpler than the cure. In politics – everywhere and since forever: you can’t correct an evil that you have misidentified; you can’t correct an evil that you keenly ignore; you can’t correct an evil when you are the evil.
