It does for shareholders, the only people who matter in a capitalist economy. The only people at all, really, everyone else is just a resource to be maximally extracted from.
Everything is NOT a market, that’s a profoundly ideological statement. Check out Karl Polanyi and the distinction between a society with markets vs a market society. We live in a market society, but that is a historically unprecedented state of affairs - historically, many important aspects of society were distributed and regulated through other social forms. It is capitalism alone which commodifies everything under the sun, including land, housing and labor. Many of the most awful aspects of our society are rooted in this historic aberration and the creative destruction it brings with it.
I think it is useful, and that’s a perfect way to describe mainstream economics. What’s frustrating (but predictable) is that there exists an entirely separate branch of economics which makes much more powerful observations about the fundamental nature of capitalist economics, including politics, power, and sociology. But Marxist economics are simply excluded from the Western economic tradition because it makes value judgements which directly and dangerously controversy the interests of the ruling capitalist class. In a healthier world, elements of mainstream economics would be combined with the fundamental Marxist critique of capitalism to produce new systems that are more efficient and less exploitative.
Thank you for demonstrating my point. Economics imagines that it's possible to divorce the two, when it fundamentally is not. When economists do attempt to divorce the two, they inevitable work from a set of political assumptions which reinforce and never directly challenge the existing distribution of resources and power.
It's a very adroit slight of hand that benefits the global economic elite: "Hey there, smart professional, I want you to think VERY hard about this problem of how to efficiently allocate resources. Oh but you're not allowed to question why I, the descendant of a colonial robber baron have the ability to personally deploy the wealth of entire nations, and your definition of efficiency is literally just return on investment, no need to worry about questions like 'will the planet remain habitable' or 'is this system in any way just.'"
Strongly agree about values propagated into everything. Speaking of game theory, I highly recommend Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap. He talks about John Nash, the Cold War ethos and his struggle with schizophrenia, both of which highly influenced his work and view of humankind as utility-maximizing machines. Obviously lots of economic implications, kind of touches on "homo economicus", that sort of thing.
Yeah, and because basically all of mainstream economics has VERY strong ideology built into its foundational assumptions, and its practitioners enjoy a great deal of (largely undeserved) respect and often great power (unlike other more truly scientific fields), the odds that a mainstream economist would look at the failure of their theories and conclude "wow, everything we've been doing is deeply flawed at best" is low. Good luck getting a mainstream economist to dig deeply and take a critical look at the fundamental contradictions within capitalism.
If only there were a branch of economic thought which predicted regular, increasingly intense crises of capital, say, one which was articulated by a bearded 19th century German...
Golly, if I didn't know any better I'd think that maybe the field that deals with questions of power and resource allocation might not actually be apolitical, but may be primarily driven by the need to justify existing distributions of power and resources.
I think the answer lies in the history of the collapse of the mid-20th century consensus (capitalist economy with strong unions, regulations, welfare state ad broadly shared prosperity) and the rise of neoliberalism starting in the 1970s.
Neoliberalism seeks to roll back the welfare state, deregulate industry, and - above all else - crush unions. It's an ideology created and propagated by and for the billionaire class, who resented the limits imposed on their power in the mid-20th century, and it captured both political parties by the 1980s.
People who say "unions are good" almost always have a critique of unions (they should be more democratic, member-led, etc.), but our neoliberal environment is SO strongly anti-union that it's not strategic to give ammunition to billionaire-backed union busters.
(Ironically, the intensely anti-union environment actually makes for worse unions. When you're struggling to survive it's hard to be on your A game)
I just moved to Oahu (Kaneohe) from the mainland, thanks to flexibility of a 100% remote gig. Worth checking out, and if you play your cards right you can get a solid salary to boot. weworktremotely.com, angel list, etc.