The recent collapse of the world economy and the attempts to save it have highlighted the role played in society by classical economics and economists. Not since the middle ages has a belief system and its episcopate so dominated secular society as classical economics and economists has these past 30 or so years. So what is wrong with that, you may ask?
Here are some of whats wrong with it (Can you think of more?):
- Despite every attempt to demonstrate its kinship to science there is no natural or scientific law that requires that it be set up as it is.
- It is a system set up by men to benefit men and based upon the evolutionary directives of their sex.
- It assumes human behavior is deterministic and minimizes the unpleasant fact that people can and do choose and agree to live and act in ways inconsistent with its theology.
- It was developed in an attempt to explain certain international transactions and the actions of a few men in coffee houses in sixteenth century England. It failed to establish any significant predictive value for those transactions then and it fails to do so now for contemporary transactions.
- It has for the most part been immune to the advances of science, biology, sociology and psychology that have occurred over the past 400 years.
- It relies on classifications of people and activities that at best are illustrative of certain past events and at worst worthless.
- It claims, like a religion, that it can explain most significant political, commercial and mass behavioral activities while it steadfastly ignores other explanations and analyses for the same phenomena.
- It refuses to recognize that is has a fundamental conflict of interest at its core in that its episcopate, the economists, generally are employees and agents of the system that rewards them and that they then claim they have the ability to unbiasedly describe and analyze.
- It has at best become neither a hard science nor a social science but a lobby for itself and its employers.
- It has polluted the system by which we govern ourselves by claiming expertise where it is lacking.
- It assumes that because its practitioners can articulate what may have happened in the past they are better suited to guess what will occur in the future than anyone else with access to the same information.
- It steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that expertise in describing past transactions does not qualify one for advising on or administering anything.
In short classical economics is treated today as a religion and its practitioners, the economists, as priests. In order to deal with the current crisis we should add economists to Shakespeare's famous quote about lawyers.