Today’s economist of the day is actually a continental philosopher. . .
While it would be inappropriate to consider the austerity plans run by the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (recently grouped together as the “troika”) ideologically “racist,” they are certainly “metaphysically violent.” As Paul Krugman explained in a New York Times magazine article a few years ago, the problem with establishment economists is that they mistake mathematics for truth; they are “seduced by the vision of a perfect, frictionless market system [and] need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly.” The economists of the troika are not imposing violent austerity measures simply to politically dominate the European nations but rather to exclude any competing existential project, that is, any alteration to the troika’s vision of “the market.”
Santiago Zabala, “How to Be a European (Union) Philosopher”
