Comment on Mathew Kahn on ‘2007 Krugman on Milton Friedman’
Blog-Reference and Blog-Reference
The current state of economics is that of a cargo cult#1 or fake science. Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism do not satisfy the scientific criteria of formal and material consistency. The major approaches are PROVABLY false.
Economics is a failed science. Since the founding fathers, economics has been political economics and political economics has produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years.
Both Friedman and Krugman are part of the failure. Faced with this indisputable fact Mathew Kahn looks the other way and concludes: “... what the world needs now, I’d argue, is a counter-counterreformation.”
This is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is: “So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science." (Feynman). Or, as Joan Robinson put it: “Scrap the lot and start again.” Neither Friedman nor Krugman can be taken seriously. There is no such thing as a reformation or counter-reformation or counter-counterreformation of an axiomatically false theory. There is only the wastebasket.
Accordingly, what the world needs, first of all, is the public clarification that economics is actually not a science. This is realized by deleting the word Sciences from the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”.#2
The logical next step is to institutionally terminate the nuisance that is economics by expelling it officially from the sciences and by throwing the ‘throng of superfluous economists’ (Joan Robinson) out of the scientific community. It should be pretty obvious that Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman were political agenda pushers and NOT scientists, and the same applies to Orthodoxy’s Krugman and Heterodoxy’s Varoufakis and the rest of the political clowns in the Circus Maximus.
There is no place in science for the proto-scientific garbage that has hitherto been labeled economics. The economists that Mathew Kahn hypes as public intellectuals have to be correctly called political agenda pushers and fake scientists.
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
#1 Feynman’s term, see Wikipedia
#2 The real problem with the economics Nobel
Immediately following A rough business plan for science.