When Theory Colonizes Reality: A Philosopher's Critique of Economic Imperialism

By John-Michael Kuczynski

Suppose a Western-trained economist, stuffed full of Arrow-Debreu models and rational expectations theory, is asked to help manage the economy of a non-Western society—say, an indigenous confederation or a resurgent theocratic kingdom or even a remnant of a premodern empire like the Incas.

What happens next?

Not observation. Not listening. Not curiosity. Instead, the economist immediately begins translating: "What's your interest rate? What's your marginal productivity of labor? How do you define utility? Where is your market for future risk hedging?"

None of these questions make sense within the native conceptual world. But that doesn't matter. The economist isn't there to learn. He's there to re-code.

This is the real face of intellectual colonization. It's not just missionaries and flags. It's equations and utility curves imposed on cultures that do not recognize those categories. And when a living economic system—with its own rituals, temporal rhythms, taboos, and meanings—is forcibly mapped onto a Western model, something essential is lost.

This isn't a theoretical worry. It happens. Over and over.

An Incan administrator describes a labor system organized around sacred seasons, familial debt, and reciprocal land stewardship. The economist, thinking he's brilliant, replies: "Ah, yes, a kind of non-monetary, kinship-based tax structure with a redistributive efficiency function."

No. That’s not what it is.

That’s just a bad translation masquerading as understanding. And worse: it’s a flattening. The ritual is no longer a ritual. The sacred is no longer sacred. It's all just data for a spreadsheet.

The real damage begins when the modeler believes he understands more than the culture he's modeling. Because now he not only translates, he begins to intervene.

"We must increase productivity in this region. The opportunity cost of these rituals is too high. If we shift labor from festival preparation to surplus farming, we can raise GDP by 2%."

GDP. In a society without money.

This is where theory becomes imperial. When economists attempt to predict or restructure alien economies using only their own conceptual vocabulary, they aren't doing science. They're doing metaphysical violence. They're converting a world into a format that their models can digest, and discarding everything else as noise.

And yes, models can be useful. They can clarify. They can simplify. But when the model becomes the reality, we are no longer describing. We are distorting.

If you want to understand a society, you must first allow it to remain strange. You must see its economy not as a market-in-waiting, but as a living, breathing form of life. That takes humility. Not equations.

Without that humility, economic theory isn't a tool. It's a colonizer with a calculator.