A few weeks ago, an obscure video of a years-old lecture delivered in a stuffy Oxford University library resurfaced and made the rounds on TikTok. In the talk, Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean economics professor at the University of Cambridge, says:

Economics has become a bit like Catholic theology in medieval Europe. It has become the language of rulers. So if you don’t speak economics, you cannot participate in any debate. . . . 

But of course they are not going to let you speak it — in the exact same way that the Vatican banned the translation of the Bible into local languages in the medieval times. . . . 

Once you create this body of knowledge, which is not accessible to other people, you can basically bully other people into accepting your argument because other people cannot understand you.

Recent years of economic and social upheaval have brought to brighter light how capitalists use the esoteric language of economics to sell the public on class warfare. Since the beginning of the pandemic, capitalists and their allies have blatantly instrumentalized economic concepts like inflation, recession, labor shortages, and supply chain shortages to justify ripping off consumers, raising rents and evicting tenants, and depressing wages and firing workers — and to dismiss anyone who objects to these practices as economically illiterate.