The Chicago School of Economics: A Political Takeover Masquerading as Science

For decades, the Chicago School of Economics has been held up by its adherents as the intellectual engine behind “free market” policies—its faculty lionized, its ideology exported, its disciples placed in positions of power across the globe. But beneath the polished veneer of economic modeling and Nobel prizes lies something far more insidious: not a neutral scientific project, but a political takeover cloaked in the language of rationality.

The Chicago School—rooted in the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics and typified by figures like Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Gary Becker—has long promoted the idea that markets are efficient, individuals are rational actors, and government interference should be minimal. Its tools are equations; its products are policies. But the effects of those policies—deregulation, privatization, austerity, and corporate tax cuts—reveal a consistent political orientation: upward wealth redistribution and consolidation of power among the elite.

This isn’t science. It’s sophistry.

A “Science” That Can’t Predict

Unlike the physical sciences, economics—particularly the Chicago School strain—has failed spectacularly at prediction. It didn’t anticipate the global financial crash of 2008. It didn’t predict the collapse of neoliberal development models in Latin America, Russia, or post-invasion Iraq. What it has done, instead, is offer intellectual cover for policies that have made the global economy less stable and more unequal.

If this were biology or engineering, the repeated failures would warrant rethinking the entire theoretical framework. But Chicago-style economics survives because it is not held accountable by the standards of real science. It is propped up by billionaire-funded think tanks, right-wing political operatives, and a compliant media machine that prizes certainty over complexity.

Crisis as a Feature, Not a Bug

The most telling feature of the Chicago School is its acceptance—even embrace—of financial collapse. To these economists, crises are inevitable market “corrections,” moments of creative destruction that supposedly cleanse inefficiencies. But these corrections always seem to fall hardest on workers, the poor, and the public sector.

When the crashes come, the Chicago School has a solution: public bailouts for private failure. In 2008, the banks that tanked the economy were rescued with taxpayer money. Airlines, oil companies, and private equity firms have enjoyed the same perks during subsequent downturns. Risk is privatized during booms and socialized during busts. This is not market discipline. It’s a revolving door between state and capital, justified by the rhetorical sleight-of-hand of “market efficiency.”

Disciples Without Scrutiny

Graduates of the Chicago School populate central banks, finance ministries, and international institutions like the IMF and World Bank. In countries from Chile under Pinochet to post-Soviet Russia, these “experts” imposed shock therapy on fragile societies—cutting public services, smashing unions, and opening markets to foreign capital. The human cost has been immense: hunger, homelessness, reduced life expectancy, and lost sovereignty.

And yet, because the ideology is couched in the technocratic language of “growth” and “efficiency,” it is rarely scrutinized in mainstream discourse. As the sociologist Philip Mirowski has argued, neoliberal economists effectively launder ideology through the language of science. They wear lab coats, but they serve oligarchs.

Higher Education as a Host

Higher education didn’t just incubate this ideology; it exported it. Endowed chairs, corporate-funded centers, and prestigious lecture circuits have made Chicago School economists wealthy and powerful. Institutions like the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute have amplified their ideas while silencing dissent. Critical perspectives—Marxist, feminist, ecological—have been marginalized or defunded in economics departments across the U.S. and much of the Global North.

Meanwhile, public universities struggling for funding have adopted Chicago-style managerial logic: metrics over mission, ROI over learning, adjuncts over tenure. The logic of the market has colonized the classroom.

The Ideology of the Empire

Chicago School economics has become the lingua franca of empire. It rationalizes austerity, justifies tax havens, normalizes poverty, and sanctifies inequality. It tells working people that if they’re poor, they must be irrational. It tells governments to balance budgets, not lives. It tells universities to behave like hedge funds.

The project is not just intellectual—it is political. And its time is up.

In a world facing climate collapse, runaway inequality, and democratic backsliding, we must recognize Chicago economics for what it is: not a neutral science but a strategic takeover. A theology of markets with no god but capital, no law but competition, and no justice but profit.

It cannot predict. It does not prevent. And it refuses to be held accountable.

Let us end the charade.

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Sources:

• Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013)

• Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (2007)

• Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018)

• Robert Kuttner, Debtors’ Prison (2013)

• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011)

For more critical investigations into political economy and higher education, visit Higher Education Inquirer.