These are harrowing times. Amid soaring inequality, political leaders in many countries are cutting programs and services that benefit the poor, while stoking fear and anger against migrants and refugees. Their noble-sounding intentions to safeguard individual freedom, promote prosperity, and protect citizens are often a fig leaf for a policy agenda designed to enrich themselves and their wealthy cronies.

This deterioration in the practice of politics can be attributed to many causes. One of the most important may be found in the deterioration in how economics is practised.

Economics is often described as a scientific discipline, which studies "if-then" propositions without reference to morals and values. But scientific findings do affect our values and normative judgments, and claims of "scientific objectivity" can be used to rationalise actions that offend our moral sensibilities. The logic of mainstream economics, in particular, the long-dominant neoliberal ideology, which emphasises growth, efficiency, and market freedom, has often justified and even encouraged greed, exploitation, and extreme inequality.

This may well be built into the discipline. A 2012 study, based on the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen's "capability approach", a framework for evaluating economic arrangements that focuses on people's ability to live the kinds of lives they value, not simply on material wealth, found that some educational approaches can help make people more caring and cooperative. But other studies indicate that students of economics tend to behave more selfishly than others, indicating that economics, as it is taught, may well promote selfishness as a normal or even desirable ethical principle.

The problem, argued another Nobel laureate economist, the late Kenneth Arrow, in a relatively unknown 1978 paper, is that the "model laissez-faire world of total self-interest" that neoclassical economics envisions "would not survive for ten minutes" in a "world of any complexity." Markets cannot function unless economic actors, even "competing firms and individuals," reliably honour "reciprocal obligations."

In other words, they depend on trust and cooperation.

Arrow also challenged the tendency of mainstream economics to treat freedom and equality as contradictory. The neoliberal logic is that any amount of inequality is natural and fair, and thus any intervention to reduce it erodes freedom. One reaps what one sows. Wealth must have been earned, such as through hard work or innovative thinking, and one should be "free" to enjoy the spoils of contributions.

But, as Arrow pointed out, when "a few" are making the "major decisions on which human welfare depend[s]," they are doing so "in their own interests." In his view, freedom and equality were "close to identical" in "many contexts." Actions that undermine equality, such as strike-breaking and "more subtle forms of economic pressure," cause the "freedom of workers" to be "much restricted," and the "absorption of the economy by a small elite" implies that "formal democracy and freedom" are a "sham."