Beyond the Market: What Makes a Good Economist Today?

“Economists should be like dentists,” John Maynard Keynes once said, technical, precise, and practical. Yet, for all their technical expertise, today’s economists are often reduced to a narrow archetype: the market analyst. Equipped with charts, forecasts, and jargon, this figure appears regularly in media soundbites and investment briefings, diagnosing the heartbeat of the market as if that alone were the pulse of a social order.

This reduction, however, betrays the true breadth and responsibility of the economic discipline. A good economist is not merely a technician of prices and trends. In fact, when economists confine themselves to the realm of markets alone, they become a part of a system that privileges efficiency over justice, growth over sustainability, and technical expertise over democratic legitimacy.

The truth is stark: economics is not neutral. It never was. It is a deeply political practice, operating within and often shaping our social, legal, institutional, and ecological realities. A good economist, therefore, must be much more than a market whisperer. He or she must be a critical thinker, a systems navigator, and, above all, a citizen.

I. The Economist as Technician: A Comfortable Illusion

In many university classrooms and financial newsrooms, the economist is cast as an objective analyst. This figure believes in rational markets, utility-maximizing individuals, and equilibrium outcomes. They rely on econometric models and predictive tools to explain and forecast phenomena like inflation, employment, or asset prices.

This is the economist molded by the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, a period that idolized deregulation, privatization, and global capital flows. It is the era that birthed the “great moderation” myth and lulled much of the profession into a false sense of control. As Ben Fine aptly puts it, mainstream economics became a "deductive machine," distancing itself from realities like inequality, race, gender, and environmental collapse.

The global financial crisis of 2008 laid bare the hollowness of this model. Queen Elizabeth famously asked a room full of economists at the London School of Economics why no one saw it coming. The answer lies in their methodological blind spots: they weren’t trained to consider power structures, systemic risk, or political dynamics. They were too busy tracking bond yields.

Economists working in financial markets are typically tasked with a singular mission: profit generation. Their analyses revolve around data trends, forecasts, and quantitative models designed to optimize outcomes for the institutions they serve, i.e. banks, hedge funds, consultancies, etc. This is a positive approach to economics: describing and predicting what is, with little concern for what ought to be. But the academic study of economics cannot remain confined to this narrow lens.

At its core, economics is, and must be, a normative discipline. It must grapple with values, goals, and societal priorities. The critical questions are not merely whether inflation will rise or interest rates will fall, but whether policies are just, sustainable, and conducive to human flourishing.

II. Economics as Political Practice

Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal’s classic work The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory forcefully argues that economics is unavoidably value-laden. He dissects how economists’ ideologies and policy preferences shape their theories, debunking the notion of a purely objective economics. Myrdal insisted that to present economic theory as “neutral” is itself a political act, one that can obscure underlying ethical and social assumptions. This is a foundational text on economics as a normative (not just positive) discipline, complementing other critiques that claims of value-neutrality often cloak conservative or status-quo biases.

A more honest approach begins by acknowledging that economic systems are embedded within broader political and institutional structures. As Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation, the idea of a “self-regulating market” is a fiction. Markets are not natural or autonomous. They are socially constructed and politically maintained.

Take the global supply chain. It isn’t just a triumph of comparative advantage. It is also the result of trade agreements shaped by corporate lobbying, labor repression in the Global South, and international institutions like the IMF and WTO enforcing structural adjustment programs.

Or consider climate change: an “externality” in neoclassical terms, but in reality, the product of economic models that discount the future, ignore ecological thresholds, and treat nature as a limitless input. Nicholas Stern called it “the greatest market failure the world has seen,” yet mainstream economics continues to treat environmental collapse as a line item in cost-benefit analyses.

The same applies to inequality. Economists often model it as an unfortunate outcome of skills or productivity differences, rather than the result of wage suppression, tax policy, and the weakening of labor institutions. When Thomas Piketty challenged this view with his data-rich Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he reignited a conversation that orthodox models had long rendered invisible.

This raises a deeper question: Is economics truly a science? If its foundational schools of thought (classical, Keynesian, monetarist, Marxist, Austrian, neoclassical, post-Keynesian, ecological) are built on differing, often incompatible ideologies, then what claims can it make to scientific objectivity?

Unlike physics or chemistry, economics lacks universally accepted laws. It offers no final theory of value, no consensus on how markets work, or even whether markets should exist in the first place. What it has instead are paradigms, each shaped by historical context, power relations, and political agendas. Thus, to call economics a science in the same way as the natural sciences is misleading. It is better understood as a social science, one that is interpretive, contested, and inseparable from ideology.

III. The Changing Definition of a Good Economist

What, then, does it mean to be a good economist in a world marked by polycrisis in which climate change, democratic erosion, rising inequality, and geopolitical instability converge?

The answer is not timeless. The definition of a good economist is historical, contingent upon the dominant social needs and political conditions of the era. In the postwar period, a good economist might have been a Keynesian state planner, engineering full employment and social welfare through fiscal policy. In the neoliberal age, the same term was often reserved for those who could “discipline” public spending, liberalize markets, and assure credit rating agencies.

Today, in an age defined by precarity and planetary limits, the bar must be different. A good economist is not one who can recite the Taylor Rule or model GDP growth. It is someone who can reckon with capitalism’s contradictions, challenge power structures, and offer alternatives rooted in justice and sustainability.

Amartya Sen offers a compelling vision of such a thinker, one who sees economics as a moral science, concerned with human capabilities and freedom, not just income levels. Similarly, Mariana Mazzucato’s work urges economists to ask, “What is value?” reframing the conversation around what societies actually need rather than what markets reward.

A good economist today must be willing to confront uncomfortable truths: that GDP growth can coexist with poverty, that price stability can mask political instability, that “efficiency” can reproduce structural violence. They must know how to decode not just spreadsheets, but ideologies. When efficiency is prioritized above all else, it often justifies cost-cutting at the expense of human dignity: slashing social services, outsourcing labor to exploitative regimes, or displacing vulnerable populations in the name of growth. Such choices, while economically 'efficient,' can deepen inequality and entrench systemic harm. True economic insight, then, must interrogate not only outcomes but also the values and power structures behind them.

Economics is, at its core, an academic field, one deeply shaped by competing worldviews. Unlike the natural sciences, its concepts are not ideologically neutral. Economic ideas reflect normative assumptions about society, power, and the role of the state. As a result, the definition of a “good economist” inevitably varies depending on who is doing the evaluation.

A central banker may prize inflation control above all else. A policymaker may focus on cost-benefit analysis. A community organizer may look for solutions to systemic inequality. These definitions are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They reveal that economics is not just a science of resources. It is a battleground of ideologies. In that battleground, the economist is never just a technician. They are a political actor.

IV. Core Values: Sustainability, Equality, Democracy

At the heart of this reimagining lie three non-negotiable values, sustainability, equality, and democracy. These are not external to economics. They are its very foundation, if we take seriously the goal of building livable futures.

Sustainability means rejecting models that discount future generations or treat ecosystems as secondary concerns. It calls for integrating ecological boundaries into economic reasoning, a task that ecological economists like Herman Daly and Kate Raworth have pioneered with concepts like the “steady-state economy” and the “doughnut model.”

Equality is not just about income redistribution. It is about recognizing how economic structures reproduce privilege and marginalization. This includes everything from racial capitalism (as theorized by Cedric Robinson) to gendered divisions of labor. A good economist must recognize that “inequality” is not a data point. It is a system of power.

Democracy is perhaps the most urgent and neglected value. As democratic backsliding accelerates globally, economists must resist the technocratic impulse that distances expertise from accountability. Economic policy is never neutral. Central banks, fiscal rules, trade regimes, these are political institutions with profound democratic implications.

The good economist, then, is not merely a data interpreter, but a political actor. Their task is not only to describe the world, but to imagine and advocate for better ones.

Conclusion: Economists as Citizens, Contributors to Humanity

We live in an era where the most urgent challenges (climate breakdown, inequality, democratic fragility) are not market failures. They are symptoms of deeper systemic dysfunctions. If economists limit themselves to reading the market's pulse, they will miss the patient’s collapse.

To be a good economist today is to reject reductionism. It is to study not just the market, but the moral, political, and institutional frameworks that shape it. It is to ask not only “How does this system work?” but “Who benefits, who loses, and what alternatives are possible?”

A good economist is, above all, a contributor to humanity’s well-being. Their purpose is not to optimize profits or forecast equities, but to help design systems that uphold life, dignity, and fairness. In this sense, economists who confine themselves to market analysis become instruments of the profit-making machinery of the capitalist order. They are not neutral observers, but functional components of an extractive system useful to capital, but indifferent to society.

This distortion is not theoretical. It has been rewarded at the highest levels. The Nobel Prize in Economics, for instance, has historically privileged models and theorists whose work is dazzlingly elegant, yet ethically vacant.

Think of Robert Lucas, who argued that macroeconomic policy could no longer systematically improve outcomes, and whose rational expectations theory undermined support for government intervention even amid mass unemployment. Or Edward Prescott, co-laureate with Finn Kydland, whose Real Business Cycle theory suggested that economic fluctuations were optimal responses to productivity shocks, essentially dismissing recessions as natural and benign. These approaches sever economics from lived human suffering.

Even more troubling is how these Nobel-sanctioned ideas often ignore or trivialize questions of equality and democracy. The dominant models have consistently abstracted away from institutionalized injustice, political disenfranchisement, and historical exploitation. No meaningful discussion of labor power, race, or colonial legacies exists in the worldviews of these celebrated figures.

Consider Friedrich Hayek, awarded the Nobel in 1974, whose celebration of free markets came with explicit disdain for democratic planning and egalitarian ideals. Hayek viewed even moderate redistributive policies as threats to freedom, a framework later invoked to justify harsh neoliberal reforms in Chile under Pinochet. Or take James Buchanan, intellectual father of public choice theory, whose economic arguments against state intervention and social spending were later tied to coordinated efforts to curtail democratic governance in favor of market dominance, as chronicled by historian Nancy MacLean in Democracy in Chains.

In a global order increasingly shaped by democratic decay and authoritarian capitalism, this intellectual omission is not innocent.

Likewise, William Nordhaus, awarded the Nobel in 2018 for integrating climate change into economic modeling, used a discount rate so high it effectively rationalized inaction, treating future generations as less valuable. His work gave the illusion of engagement with ecological crisis while justifying delay and inaction. Sustainability became a marginal note in the profit calculus.

These are not merely academic missteps. They reflect a larger moral failure. They reveal how the economics profession, even at its most prestigious heights, has often chosen technical cleverness over social conscience.

This divergence calls to mind a powerful parallel from jurisprudence: not every law delivers justice. Legal codes can uphold oppression, just as economic models can legitimize inequality, environmental destruction, and authoritarianism. Law becomes just only when grounded in moral and democratic principles. So too with economics. Without sustainability, equality, and democracy, it is not a science of well-being, but a tool of domination.

And yet, even within academia, where critical thought should thrive, there are structural barriers that silence the economists we most need. Many academic economists work in privately owned universities, where their freedom to question the economic order is constrained by institutional allegiance to donors, boards, and market interests. Ideas that challenge the foundations of profit-making—particularly those rooted in sustainability, equality, or democratic restructuring are unlikely to be welcomed when they conflict with the financial interests of the university’s benefactors.

Meanwhile, in state-owned universities under autocratic regimes, academic economists face a different, but equally severe, threat: repression. To question the government’s economic policies, especially those tied to cronyism, inequality, or environmental degradation, is to risk professional isolation, censorship, or even dismissal. In such environments, economic critique becomes an act of courage and often a liability.

So where, then, are the economists who will defend theories and policies aligned with sustainability, equality, and democracy? Where should we look for them, if not in the very institutions designed for open inquiry?

Perhaps it is time to revisit the fundamental meaning of the university itself, a term derived from the Latin universitas, meaning "the whole," or "the universe." The university was meant to be a space for total inquiry, unbounded by profit, ideology, or fear. When that mission is compromised, so too is the future of critical economics. To restore the university’s true purpose is not just an academic project. It is a political one.

The late economist Robert Heilbroner famously warned of a “crisis of vision” in modern economic thought. In his 1996 essay of the same name, he argued that economics had become blinded by abstraction, obsessed with mathematical elegance while losing sight of its original purpose: to understand the human condition and shape the good society. “Economics has lost the capacity to ask the big questions,” Heilbroner wrote, “because it has buried itself in small ones.”

Heilbroner critiqued the profession’s abandonment of historical and philosophical inquiry, noting that most modern economists no longer ask what kind of society we should build only how to fine-tune mechanisms that already exist. This technocratic tunnel vision, he warned, leaves economics vulnerable to legitimizing inequality, environmental destruction, and authoritarianism, not by commission, but by omission.

Heilbroner’s call was clear: without vision, economics becomes a tool of power rather than a guide for justice. A good economist, then, must do more than measure.

Economics, ultimately, is a human science. A good economist is not just a skilled technician. He or she is a conscious citizen of the world. One who dares to ask the uncomfortable questions, and dares even more to imagine better answers.

Has the thought of economics itself become a casualty of capitalism’s contradictions?