Comment on David Ruccio on ‘Limits of mainstream economics today’
David Ruccio argues: “On one side are neoclassical economists, who celebrate the invisible hand and argue that markets are the best way to efficiently allocate scarce resources. On the other side are Keynesian economists, who argue instead for the visible hand of government intervention to move markets toward full employment.” And “What mainstream economics includes is the idea that neoclassical and Keynesian approaches establish the limits within which theoretical and policy debates can and should take place. Together, they define what is in the “economic toolkit,” and therefore what it means to ‘think like an economist’.” And “What the definition of mainstream economics excludes is any approach, such as Marxian economics, that is based on a theoretical approach that lies outside the protocols of neoclassical and Keynesian economics.”
This is descriptively correct but misses the point altogether. The lethal defect of economics is that the major approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and ALL get the foundational economic concept of profit wrong. Economics is a heap of proto-scientific garbage. Hence, economic policy guidance NEVER has had sound scientific foundations. With regard to scientific content, there is NO difference between left, center, or right policy. It is all brain-dead agenda-pushing.
So, there is no such thing as a choice between bad mainstream and good Marxian economics. Marx, too, got profit and exploitation wrong.#2 As a consequence, both Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy have to be buried for good at the Flat-Earth-Cemetery. What is needed is the true Paradigm.
The good news is that the Paradigm Shift is an accomplished fact, see the new textbook Sovereign Economics.#3
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
Related 'Confused Confusers: How to Stop Thinking Like an Economist and Start Thinking Like a Scientist' and 'Ending the pluralism of provably false economic theories with the long-overdue Paradigm Shift' and 'Stop Recycling Dead Economic Theories, Start the Paradigm Shift' and 'The new economic Paradigm requires a new textbook'. For details of the big picture see cross-references Paradigm Shift.
***
Wikimedia AXEC106m
***
