The current Philippine debate on wealth tax among local economists is giving me a headache (and the super hot summer temperature is not helping). It is also a bit triggering and reminded me why I did not pursue a career as an economist.
Yes, I have a bachelor’s degree in economics (with Latin honors). I even took a master’s degree in economics immediately after but got sidetracked into politics before I could start my master’s thesis.
I think I left economics because I started asking what those economic models were actually for and who they were quietly assuming the world was built for.
Mainstream economics is very good at describing systems. It can model inequality, predict behavior, optimize outcomes. But it often stops just short of asking whether the system itself deserves to be optimized in its current form.
That gap started to feel important to me. The more I studied it, the more I found myself asking questions that did not fit neatly into equations — questions about power, history, and who benefits and who is left to carry the burden.
The story economics tells itself about the world is a bit of a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist fever dream. And I wanted to tell a different story.
The idea that some nations are naturally “productive” and others are naturally “backward” was an economic theory that was a polite justification for colonialism. Land and labor are treated as “factors of production” alongside machinery as if people and their ancestral homes are just “inputs.”
A lot of economic frameworks are built on colonial history. Entire economies are measured by how closely they approximate a model that was never designed with their histories in mind. Growth becomes the goal, even when that growth comes from extraction — of labor, of land, and of resources that were never equally distributed in the first place.
Then there is the patriarchal spreadsheet. For decades, economics assumed the “rational economic man” is one who is very competitive, self-interested, and emotionless who optimizes his utility function like a sociopath with a calculator.
Unpaid care work, raising children, cooking meals, holding a dying parent’s hand — none of that shows up in the gross domestic product (GDP). None of that counts as “productive” unless it enters the market. It is invisible in GDP yet it is the backbone that makes everything else function. That is a strange omission for a discipline that claims to measure value.
Half of the world’s work — disproportionately done by women — are not counted. And when feminists like Marilyn Waring pointed this out, economists basically shrugged and said, “Well, it’s hard to measure.” The profession that invented derivatives to price options on orange juice futures cannot figure out how to count a mother’s labor. It is not a measurement problem. It is a choice.
And, of course, there’s capitalism. Most economic models do not question it. Markets are described as natural forces, almost like weather systems, rather than human-designed structures with winners and losers built into their architecture. Inequality that shows up in the equations is treated as a side effect, not a central concern.
Here’s the thing. Economics trains you to think in terms of trade-offs. Efficiency versus equity. Growth versus sustainability. Freedom versus fairness. But those trade-offs are only tragic if you have already accepted the system’s premises. What if I don’t accept them?
What if I think that a society that produces billionaires and homeless people in the same community has simply failed and no amount of “deadweight loss” diagram can dress that up as optimal? What if I think that treating nature as a “negative externality” that you can price with a carbon tax misses the point that rivers are not “capital” and forests are not “resources” for profit?
I just think profit maximization is a weird moral philosophy to build a community on.
Economics is fascinating. It explains a lot but not everything. Especially not things like dignity, care, history, or power. Changing the system requires more than just pointing out its flaws. It requires power.
Economics, for all its colonial-patriarchal-capitalist baggage, is very good at diagnosis. It can show you, in clean graphs and tidy regressions, that land reform lowers inequality. It can prove that unpaid care work props up the entire wage economy. It can demonstrate that colonial extraction created the wealth gap we see today.
But economics cannot — and will not — tell you how to make the landlord give back the land. It cannot force the government to tax the billionaires. It cannot make the World Bank apologize. That is politics.
Politics is messy, uncomfortable, stressful. But it is where systems are contested in real time. Where the rules are not just analyzed, but written, resisted, and rewritten. It is where inequality is not just measured but argued over, justified, or challenged.
Economics often pretends to be neutral. Politics never does. It is explicitly about power — who has it or does not and how it shifts. So my shift was from describing systems to engaging with the question of how those systems are shaped and reshaped over time.
The systems economics did not name — colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism — are openly named and discussed in politics.
Colonialism did not end, it rebranded as “international development” and “debt restructuring.” The same logic that justified plantations now justifies austerity. Patriarchy is even louder in politics. The unpaid care work that economics ignored? Politics actively exploits it then blames women for not showing up to meetings when their child gets sick. And capitalism? It is alive and thriving in politics. Lobbyists and fixers do not even hide. Oftentimes, the capitalist and the politician is the same person.
Economics taught me to analyze the cage. Politics taught me that cages have doors, and doors can be opened if enough people push together.
I did not stay in economics because I was too angry to make graphs and sit still. I did not choose politics so much as politics chose me — the way a stray cat chooses you, by showing up at your door, meowing loudly, and refusing to leave until you feed it.
So here I am. Still fighting and still losing sometimes. Still convinced that another world is possible, even if my spreadsheets cannot prove it. And maybe that is the point. If systems we live in are not neutral, then neither should our responses to them be.
For me, the shift was not about rejecting economics entirely, but about moving toward a space where disagreement is not an error in the model — it is the model. I abandoned economics for politics because I wanted to participate more directly in how it might change.
