A review of an economics article opens onto a larger subject: the long and unavoidable entanglement of political thought with economic thought.
The two are routinely discussed as separate disciplines with separate journals, and they have never actually been separable. Every economic model carries a view of what people are; every political argument carries assumptions about scarcity and exchange.
The Borrowed Premise
What makes the entanglement hard to see is that each field tends to import its premises from the other without noting the loan. The assumption arrives already settled, and the argument proceeds as though it were neutral machinery.
An idea that goes unexamined long enough stops looking like an idea and starts looking like a fact.
Consequences, Eventually
The title is meant more wearily than triumphantly. That ideas have consequences is not news. That we are repeatedly surprised by which ideas turn out to have them, and how long the fuse can be, is the part worth attending to.
