Opinion, conversation, interpretation, blather: the economist’s major immunizing stratagems

Comment on Inês Goncalves Raposo on ‘On Modern Monetary Theory’*

Blog-Reference and Blog-Reference

Contrary to their claim of doing science, economists have never been anything else than political agenda pushers. Because of this, the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” is a fraud.#1

“There are always many different opinions and conventions concerning any one problem or subject-matter... This shows that they are not all true. For if they conflict, then at best only one of them can be true. Thus it appears that Parmenides ... was the first to distinguish clearly between truth or reality on the one hand, and convention or conventional opinion (hearsay, plausible myth) on the other ...” (Popper)

The ancient Greek’s distinction between episteme (= knowledge) and doxa (= opinion) corresponds to the distinction between science and non-science.

The scientist’s goal is to definitively settle a given question “That the settlement of opinion is the sole end of inquiry is a very important proposition.” (Peirce)

Scientific logic posits a binary division between opposites. Truth and falsehood are opposites: there is no half-truth or half-falsehood.#2 Science is predicated on the Principle of the Excluded Middle.

The Excluded Middle, the swamp between true/false where ‘nothing is clear and everything is possible’ (Keynes), is the habitat of non- and anti-scientists, believers, IQ test failures, schizophrenics, political agenda pushers, and fraudsters.

At present, economics is NOT a science but a heap of half-truths/half-falsehoods. The major approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and all got the foundational concept of the subject matter ― profit ― wrong.

Economists work hard to maintain the status quo of the pluralism of false theories. Their modus operandi is meta-communication, that is, economists mainly talk about what other economists have said or really meant or how they have been misinterpreted.

A recent example is MMT. Inês Goncalves Raposo exhausted herself with name-dropping and who said what without ever coming to a conclusion about what is true and what is false. Thus she follows the basic methodological rule of economics, i.e. never to reach a final true/false conclusion but to keep everything in the swamp of inconclusiveness and the logical nirvana of A and non-A and to advertise  pluralistic schizo as an epistemological ideal.#3

The fact of the matter is that MMT is refuted on all counts.#4 Scientifically, MMT is dead and buried. And exactly at this point, the habitual fraud kicks in: “In economics we should strive to proceed, wherever we can, exactly according to the standards of the other, more advanced, sciences, where it is not possible, once an issue has been decided, to continue to write about it as if nothing had happened.” (Morgenstern, 1941)

Inês Goncalves Raposo’s blog post is a clear attempt to keep economics in the proto-scientific swamp of the pluralism of provably false theories.#5

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


* Bruegel, blog post Feb 11
#1 The real problem with the economics Nobel
#2 Keynesians never got this vital point: “For Keynes, as for Post Keynesians the guiding motto is ‘it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong!’” (Davidson). See here.
#3 MMT: How to get out of the infinite meta-communication loop
#4 For the full-spectrum refutation of MMT see cross-references MMT
#5 There is NO such thing as “smart, honest, honorable economists”

Related 'Links on capital-T Truth, stupidity, corruption' and 'A new curriculum for swampies?' and 'Refuting MMT’s Macroeconomics Textbook' and 'Opinion vs. Knowledge' and 'From opinion recycling to real scientific progress' and 'Knowledge only — no opinion'.

For more about immunizing stratagem see AXECquery.

Did economics fail? No! Yes, and everybody knows it!

Comment on Silvia Merler’s ‘Did Economics Fail?’

Blog-Reference and Blog-Reference on May 9

Silvia Merler reports: “The debate about rethinking economics keeps rambling.” True. And the wonderful thing is that we have heard all the arguments already multiple times.

The Pavlovian answer to the question Did Economics Fail? goes as follows: “Economics is a strange sort of discipline. The booby traps I mentioned often make it sound as it is all just a matter of opinion. That is not so. Economics is not a Science with a capital S. It lacks the experimental method as a way of testing hypotheses. . . . There are always differences of opinion at the cutting edge of a science, . . . . But they last longer in economics . . . and there are reasons for that. As already mentioned, rival theories cannot be put to an experimental test. All there is to observe is history, and history does not conduct experiments: too many things are always happening at once. The inferences that can be made from history are always uncertain, always disputable, . . . You can’t even count on a long and undisturbed run of history, because the ‘laws’ of behavior change and evolve. Excuses, excuses. But the point is not to provide excuses.” (Solow, 1998)#1

Fact is: “… suppose they [the economists] did reject all theories that were empirically falsified … Nothing would be left standing; there would be no economics.” (Hands, 2001)

Fact is: the main approaches and their variants and derivatives ― Walrasianism, DSGE, Keynesianism, Post-Keynesianism, New Keynesianism, MMT, Marxianism, Austrianism ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent and all got the foundational economic concept profit wrong.#2 What we actually have is the pluralism of provably false theories.#3

There is political economics and theoretical economics. The main differences are: (i) The goal of political economics is to successfully push an agenda, the goal of theoretical economics is to successfully explain how the actual economy works. (ii) In political economics anything goes; in theoretical economics, the scientific standards of material and formal consistency are observed.

Theoretical economics (= science) had been hijacked from the very beginning by political economists (= agenda pushers). Political economics has produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years.#4 And this means, in turn, that economic policy guidance has NO sound scientific foundations since Adam Smith/Karl Marx. The gigantic intellectual battle about Capitalism and Socialism has never been more than a Zombie wrestling show.#5

The fact is that economists bear the intellectual responsibility for all economic crises and the resulting social devastation. This is known since Napoleon: “Late in life … he claimed that he had always believed that if an empire were made of granite the ideas of economists if listened to, would suffice to reduce it to dust.” (Viner)

What failed economics needs is NOT another pointless critique, or one more silly discussions between scientifically incompetent orthodox and heterodox economists, or just another cosmetic reformation or breakthrough ― but a Paradigm Shift.

Needless to emphasize that the paradigm shift will NOT come from people who swallowed supply-demand-equilibrium hook line and sinker and never realized that what they are doing is cargo cult science.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


#1 Failed economics: The losers’ long list of lame excuses
#2 Why is economics a total scientific failure?
#3 Economics: 200+ years of scientific incompetence and fraud
#4 For details of the big picture see cross-references Political Economics
#5 Profit and the Private-Property-Irrelevance Theorem

Related 'The Law of Economists’ Increasing Stupidity' and 'Both orthodox and heterodox economists are cargo cult scientists' and 'Economics: a science without scientists'.