Rethinking the Market » Activities and Outputs

Book, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:00:00 GMT

False Prophets of Economics Imperialism: The Limits of Mathematical Market Models

Jacket Blurb: 'This book studies the methodological revolution that has resulted in economists' mathematical market models being exported across the social sciences. The ensuing process of economics imperialism has struck fear into subject specialists worried that their disciplinary knowledge will subsequently count for less. Yet even though mathematical market models facilitate important abstract thought experiments, they are no substitute for carefully contextualized empirical investigations of real social phenomena. The two exist on completely different ontological planes, producing very different types of explanation.

In this deeply researched and wide-ranging intellectual history, Matthew Watson surveys the evolution of modern economics and its modelling methodology. With its origins in Jevons and Robbins and its culmination in Samuelson, Arrow and Debreu, he charts the escape from reality that has allowed economists' hypothetical models to speak to increasingly self-referential mathematical truths. These are shown to perform badly as social truths related to the world of directly lived experiences.

The book is a formidable analysis of the epistemic limitations of modern-day economics and marks a significant counter to its methodology's encroachment across the wider social sciences.'

Endorsements:

'The most thorough and persuasive account that exists of the origins of the cognitive authority of modern economics - and the sometimes rather tenuous claims on which that authority rests. A brilliant achievement that could really only have been written by Matthew Watson but which we can all learn from.' - Professor Colin Hay, Sciences Po, Paris

'False Prophets of Economics Imperialism is a tour de force! It challenges the economics orthodoxy with sharp interrogations, multidisciplinary insights and careful and robust analysis of the history of the dismal science and its dominance of our academic and policy worlds today. This authoritative book should be read by anyone interested in how mathematical modelling came to rule the roost in economic thinking and policymaking, and why this should not be the case.' - Professor Shirin Rai, SOAS, London

'In this brilliant book, Matthew Watson reveals how economics transformed itself into the imperialist discipline that it has become today. He charts how, as economists became increasingly preoccupied with mathematical rigour, the field changed from being a study of the real economy to 'a science of choice' ... This study demonstrates the ironic path through which economics had to make itself increasingly uneconomic in order to become the discipline that sought to treat every other field through the lens of the market.' - Professor Jacqueline Best, University of Ottawa, Ontario.

False Prophets of Economics Imperialism was included in the Alternative Summer Reading List for 2024, as compiled by the Diversifying and Decolonising Economics group.

Book, The Market

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:55:00 GMT

Published by Agenda Publishing and Columbia University Press, January 2018

Back Cover Blurb: "We have become accustomed to economists and politicians talking about 'market forces' as if they are immutable laws of the universe. But what exactly is 'the market'? Originally an abstract idea from economic theory - the locus of demand and supply - it has come to inform the way we speak about our relationship to the economic system as a whole. Matthew Watson unpacks the concept to ask what does it really mean to allow ourselves to submit to market forces. And does economic theory really provide insights into the market institutions that shape our everyday life? In tackling these questions, the book provides a major contribution to a deeper appreciation of the dominant economic language of our time, challenging the idea that we can simply defer to the 'logic of the market'."

Endorsements:

"A masterpiece of erudition and concision, Matthew Watson's new book lifts the lid on a concept whose ubiquity in public discourse is matched only by its slipperiness. With immense skill, Watson explores the ways in which the idea of 'the market' has developed within the field of economics and in so doing teases out the complex relationships between academic abstraction of the market concept and the prevalence of market ideology in politics. The result is a truly impressive book that should be regarded as a vital supplement to standard economics textbooks and essential reading for anyone interested in understanding whether there are alternatives to the 'iron cage' of the market." - Professor Ben Rosamond, University of Copenhagen

"Watson has provided a history of the economic ideas that form the basis of modern economics, brilliantly explaining where many of the economic laws and concepts central to the idea of the market originated ... there are very few texts on the market that are as good as this." - Dr Huw Macartney, University of Birmingham

Book, Uneconomic Economics and the Crisis of the Model World

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:50:00 GMT

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, February 2014

Back Cover Blurb: "Matthew Watson analyses the political response to imploding markets through the lens of the history of economic thought, asking 'what has gone wrong with economics?' against the backdrop of the global financial crisis. The most important historical trend, he suggests, is the development of an 'uneconomic economics', whereby attention is placed on explaining relationships in perfectly efficient blackboard markets rather than the much more chaotic institutions encountered in everyday economic interactions. Economists now routinely devise sophisticated abstract models which are theoretically rigorous but fail to capture the way everyday economic decisions are actually undertaken. Acknowledging the gap between the model world and the real world led many commentators to initially pronounce that the financial crisis was equally a crisis of economics. Watson shows, though, that the subsequent redefinition of the crisis as a problem of over-extended state spending has successfully rehabilitated the model world of orthodox economics opinion."

Endorsements:

"To control the forces shaping our economic future, we have first to understand those shaping our immediate past. Mainstream economics claims to do that, but as this important book shows, that claim is false. Matthew Watson has written an invaluable guide to the limits of orthodox economics thinking on the 2007/8 financial crisis. It is a guide that, if read widely, will help sustain an informed citizenry on both sides of the Atlantic. Ideas matter, and the ideas discussed here matter more than most." - Professor David Coates, Worrell Professor of Anglo-American Studies, Wake Forest University, US.

"Matthew Watson's elegant and trenchant analysis shines a fiercely critical and deeply scholarly light on the profound relationship between the practices of financial markets, the modes of thought typical of orthodox economics and post-crisis policy thinking. Written with admirable clarity and concision, it stands as one of the very best - and certainly one of the most important - books yet written on the global financial crisis." - Professor Ben Rosamond, Professor of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Competition and Change Article Accepted for Publication

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:03:00 GMT

Title: ''If it Looks Like a Duck, and Quacks Like a Duck ... ': Recognitional Politics and the Political Economy of Money Market Fund Reform', Competition and Change, forthcoming. Accepted for publication, 19.07.2026.

This article was co-authored with Huw Macartney and Erin McCracken. It serves as a companion to the 2024 Economy and Society article I co-authored with Huw Macartney and Fabian Pape.

Abstract: Critics have long argued that US money market funds benefit from the best of all regulatory worlds, hiding behind securities market regulation to sell bank-like services to their customers. The “recognitional politics” approach has recently been used to show how financial firms position themselves discursively as one type of entity and not another, so that they might operate in a favourable regulatory environment. Our study follows in such a vein. Throughout the 2020-2023 reform process, the MMF industry engaged in a discursive high-wire act. It demanded to be seen in general through the perspective of securities market regulators’ legibility code, but when the SEC attempted to introduce swing pricing as if MMFs were genuine securities market firms, significant industry pushback ensued. This resulted in an intricate process of discursive hopping, whereby the attempt to stifle the swing-pricing proposals involved contradicting ongoing denials that its products had cash-like characteristics at the moment of redemption. Regulatory debates about the bank-like nature of MMFs consequently remain far from settled.

Political Quarterly Article Accepted for Publication

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:32:00 GMT

Title: 'Epistemic Injustice in Budgetary Politics: A Response to Rachel Reeves's Mais Lecture', Political Quarterly, 95 (4), 2024, 583-586. DOI: 10.1111/1467-923X.13455.

Abstract: Rachel Reeves's March 2024 Mais Lecture was an exercise in tempering hope that Britain's threadbare public services would soon be restored to health. The message of restraint might prove to be early confirmation of Reeves's instinctive governing philosophy, but it also reflected the fact that she was called upon to speak in a context of epistemic injustice. Senior Labour politicians always have to accept greater scrutiny of their fiscal policy pronouncements than their Conservative counterparts. Their statements are also susceptible to disinformation, whereby what Labour's opponents insist its frontbench team are hiding from the electorate often gets treated as a more authentic account of its plans than anything Labour says for itself.

New Political Economy Article Accepted for Publication

Mon, 27 May 2024 11:50:00 GMT

Title: ''Let me tell you a story': The Politics of Macroeconomic Models', New Political Economy, 29 (6), 2024, 844-856. DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2024.2359964. Fully open access.

Abstract: Various social science literatures suggest that the general character of macroeconomic models reflects their assumptive base. A more specialist literature in the Weintraub-Boumans-Morgan tradition shows how the mathematics of those models moulds together logical implications of particular starting assumptions, insights from generally accepted theoretical propositions, and professionalised common-sense about how the world works. I go one step further in arguing that a process of narrative moulding operates in tandem with this mathematical moulding. A naming strategy provides the mathematical properties of macroeconomic models with economic labels to create the feeling that they are something more than a merely mathematical structure. A storytelling strategy then informs policy-makers of where the solution to the system of equations positions the outer limits of both political desirability and political possibility. Future dedicated research programmes into the narrative dimensions of macroeconomic models can be expected to shed further light on how theory models can masquerade as policy models and substitute models as surrogate models.

Economy and Society Article Accepted for Publication

Mon, 27 May 2024 11:37:00 GMT

Title: 'Shape-Shifters, Chameleons and Recognitional Politics: The Asset Management Industry and Financial Regulation', Economy and Society, accepted for publication May 20th 2024, published online August 6th 2024, with Huw Macartney and Fabian Pape. DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2024.2367330. Fully open access.

Abstract: The asset management industry is becoming a systemic feature of global finance, despite having evaded regulatory scrutiny as a systemically important actor. How might this have been so? We use as our example BlackRock's running commentary on the evolving plans of both prudential (banking) and securities (market) regulators in the period from 2008 to 2018. We show how asset managers engaged in successful recognitional politics, based on a decade-long struggle to influence how they were seen across the regulatory divide. James C. Scott's most recent thoughts on legibility codes provides us with our conceptual language of shape-shifters and chameleons. Two distinct strategies were simultaneously in play. As a shape-shifter, BlackRock repeatedly changed form in its self-presentation to prudential regulators concerned with systemic risk, so they could not be certain what they were looking at. As a chameleon, it invited securities regulators to maintain their authority over the asset management industry, so it could increasingly blend into the supposedly safe category of market-based finance.

London Review of Education Article Published

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 13:56:00 GMT

I have published an article co-written with my ��TV colleague, Shahnaz Akhter in the London Review of Education. It is entitled, 'Decolonising the School Curriculum in an Era of Political Polarisation', and it appears in volume 20, issue 1 of the journal. It is published in fully open access format and is available at https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.20.1.27.

Abstract: 'Decolonising objectives have arisen in England as a reaction to a broader political context that could hardly be called supportive of such aims. Teachers who wish to engage actively with lesson planning consistent with a decolonised curriculum are confronted with ever stricter guidance from government ministers about how they are expected to stick rigidly to content that is centrally approved. With the Conservative Party currently appearing to believe it benefits electorally from engineering political polarisation, full-throated endorsement of a culture-wars narrative that associates a decolonised school curriculum with an attack on the very idea of Britishness is perhaps the logical destination. In this article, we show that the Government's insistence that decolonisation should not take place is endorsing a vision of citizenship that is wholly at odds with the realities of modern multicultural schooling.'

Competition and Change Article Published

Sun, 27 Feb 2022 13:07:00 GMT

Title: '‘Financialization, State Action and the Contested Policy Practices of Neoliberalism’, Competition and Change, 26 (2), 2022, 215-219. DOI: 10.1177/10245294221086864/.

This article was co-authored with Craig Berry from Manchester Metropolitan University and Inga Rademacher from King's College London. It serves as the Introduction to a special section of the journal, which the three of us have co-edited.

History of Political Economy Article Published

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 17:56:00 GMT

Title: 'The Place of Glasgow in The Wealth of Nations: Caught between Biography and Text, Philosophical and Commercial History', History of Political Economy, 54 (5), 2022, 975-990. DOI: 10.1215/00182702-10005816.

This article will appear in a symposium of the leading journal in its field, History of Political Economy, at some stage in 2022. The symposium is called, 'Reading Practices in Political Economy: The Case of Adam Smith'. My contribution relates to what is permissible when confronted with an absence in a text, and the particular absence through which I illustrate my argument is that of the place that Smith knew best when formulating his economic theory, Glasgow. We know from biographical studies of his life that Smith shared deep connections with the Glasgow merchants of his day: socialising with them, forming lasting friendships, and using them as key interlocutors when trying to specify the general principles on which economic progress was founded. Yet we also know from the text of The Wealth of Nations that Smith made no mention of these connections and hid the merchants he knew so well within generic character types. Why might this have been so? The methodological argument against seeking to 'correct' such absences nevertheless permits clues to be identified in the text which might reveal why noticeable absences are there. I focus on the tension between two genres of history visible within the text. Smith placed great emphasis on writing history in a philosophical register as a means of bringing abstract principles of economic development to light, but the commercial history of Glasgow entailed an unnatural progression to a global entrepôt from the perspective of his commercial history.