ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes instead that neoclassical economics be taken captive, contending that neoclassicists' notions of "market", "price", "value", "commodity", "demand", "supply", and "exchange" are but specialized and reductionist renderings of broader communicatory phenomena. The main thrust of the argument of the chapter is as follows: Mainstream economics, premised as it is on the ubiquity of commodity exchange, needs to treat information as commodity in order to account for information within the mainstream or orthodox paradigm. The penultimate section reverses the Becker/Stigler/Posner proposal and explores possibilities for "economic colonization", contending that economics' crises can be resolved only if the discipline is viewed more modestly, as but one way to investigate communicatory interaction. The chapter focuses on political economy aspects of the information commodity. Despite internal inconsistencies and incongruity with external phenomena caused by conceiving information as commodity, mainstream economics retains this analytical mode and itself remains remarkably influential.
