A fearless critic of free-market capitalism, Joan looks behind the curtain of economics to reveal a constant battle between economics as a science and economics as ideology, which she argued was integral to economics. In her pellucid style, she challenges early economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, as well as neoclassical economists Alfred Marshall, Stanley Jevons and Leon Walrus, on the value question. What they considered to be the generators of value — labour-time, marginal utility, or preferences, respectively — are not scientific but ‘metaphysical,’ and that it is frequently in ideology, not science, that we find the reason for the rejection of economic theories. Joan’s prescient message rings true in today’s unpredictable and unequal world: The task before the economist is to counter the notion that the only value that matters is that which can be measured in terms of money.
