Economist Ha-Joon Chang offers a great diagnosis for our collective acceptance of this arrangement: “Economics is now playing the role of Catholic theology in Medieval Europe. It has become an ideology that tells people that the world is what it is because it has to be, however unjust, wasteful and inefficient it may look.”

A recent study of consensus among economists reveals two important facts. First, agreement within economics has been increasing over time. This likely does not come as a surprise to the populist. Economists are, after all, apologists for neoliberal turbocapitalism, so agreement is to be expected. But second, the study finds that the emerging... See more