Economics as Agnotology: Unlimited Growth and the Limits of Knowledge

Economics as a science of equilibrium portrays the market mechanism as a system for allocating scarce resources. The development of national accounts (GDP) in response to the Great Depression and later as a tool for the centralised drive to expand war production in World War II shifted the focus of economics from equilibrium to growth. As the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the post-WWII age of oil got underway, the end of scarcity became an article of faith in development economics, implying an infinitely malleable ‘nature’ that merely required ‘technology’ to open an unlimited horizon of wealth. As a discourse closely associated with social engineering, economics has obscured the role of resource appropriation and hydrocarbon combustion in ‘economic growth’, and has thus arguably always functioned as an ‘agnotology’—a vehicle for the manufacture of culturally induced ignorance or doubt. Hayek’s political project for an authoritarian economic liberalism was explicitly concerned with the problem of social engineering given presumed collective public ignorance, the correct forms of which Hayek recognised would have to be systematically constructed. This task, for which the Atlas Network was established, reaches its darkest depths in its long-term global campaign to propagate science denial and obstruct political responses to global heating.