Supply and demand is not the only thing to influence the job market -- power and knowledge asymmetries can do the same thing just as well.
Supply and demand is not the only thing to influence the job market -- power and knowledge asymmetries can do the same thing just as well.
By analogy, adapting a James Morrow quote: "Economics does have all the answers. The problem is that we don’t have all the economics".
Power and knowledge asymmetries are well within the domain that economics tries to encompass.
We could easily have an economy where we just accept that nobody can own land or it's OK to take things by force. then economists would build their models around that framework.
There's power in there, for sure. There's instinct and emotion, too. There's thinking and reason also. It's an all of the above type of thing. But we tend to stick to the things that are most obvious to us individually.
The universe is a giant computer on a path to compute some kind of humongous outcome. We're just execution units carrying out subroutines. We may or may not have some freedom locally (that's another debate).
Human nature I understand -- people have mental/emotional shortcuts that are not precise and accurate rational analysis.
In an ideal world, economics would study power relations as they relate to money -- that's what the old economists (19th century and so) called "political economy".
In the present world, economics are a shallow ideology around the "free market", with naive abstractions and axioms. Usually these are mostly peddled by the media and "popularizer" economists at the masses, but what actual academic economists sell is not that much better.
“Money” is overly restrictive, it's really all goods and services, and the old “political economy” is a substantial part of what eventually became the field of “political science”. It may not still be considered mainly in the scope of Economics departments, but then what used to be called “natural philosophy, while still studied, isn't part of scope of the Philosophy department.