ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an internal critique of neoclassical economics in the Anthropocene by appealing only to assumptions that any economist should be prepared to grant. Whereas ecological economics has drawn attention to ecological limits, the present chapter focuses on the limits of rational agency in the Anthropocene. The assumptions of neoclassical economics now pose an existential threat to humanity. Rational choice theory is the intellectual common ground shared by economics and the physical sciences; but while the rationality characteristic of economics is derived from the methods of the natural sciences, the ontology of non-parametric market environments characteristic of prevalent economic theory is no longer salient at the scale of earth systems, thus undermining the intellectual authority of neoclassical economics in matters of governance and coordination. Among the casualties of this ceding of authority are the assumptions of the unknowability of markets dating back to the classical economic tradition, the treatment of market transactions as canonically positive-sum, and the growth paradigm. In the Anthropocene the most economically rational thing to do, somewhat paradoxically from the point of view of neoclassical economics, is to abandon that discipline as the science of social coordination.
