The 2022 Veblen-Commons Award Recipient: L. Randall Wray: Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons: Enabling Myths and Not-So-Innocent Frauds

This article examines the innocent frauds (J. K. Galbraith) or enabling myths (W. Dugger) that are used to justify capitalism’s inexcusable excesses: excessive inequality, exploitation, and war. As Joseph Campbell put it, the sociological purpose of myth is “that of validating and maintaining some specific social order, authorizing its moral code as a construct beyond criticism or human emendation”—a description of conventional economic theory with its focus on the “invisible hand” of the "free market.” Combining the socio-anthropological approaches of Campbell, the Institutionalist approach of economists like Dugger, and the literary approach of Kurt Vonnegut, this articles exposes a half dozen of the most important myths used by economists and policy-makers to protect an immoral and unsustainable social order.