ABSTRACT
The last three chapters placed under the microscope neoclassical economics’ method for explaining a range of economic phenomena at the heart of almost every market transaction: bargaining, conflict and the mutually beneficial agreements that are available to rational antagonistic parties. We found that every attempt to infuse a minimal degree of realism into the neoclassical analysis of these ubiquitous phenomena led to radical indeterminacy; to a set of optimal strategies and outcomes whose size tends to infinity. We also saw how neoclassicism responded to this indeterminacy; how it erected a wall of denial constructed out of the underhanded assumption that all beliefs and actions must, somehow, be in equilibrium. Finally, we discovered that this axiomatic imposition of an equilibrium between beliefs and stratagems is no more than the adoption of the strict version of the third meta-axiom (see Chapter 1).
