Occasional Xs: Economics ― just disinfotainment and self-hype (XXXVIII)

 

#Econ#DisInfoTainment#Economics claims to be #Science but is NOT. The representative #Economist is NOT a #Scientist but an #AgendaPusher / #Clown in the political #CircusMaximus. pic.twitter.com/acx0Hj2xIN

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) January 5, 2024

Occasional Xs: Economics ― just disinfotainment and self-hype (XXXII)

 

#Econ#FailedFakeScience#DisInfoTainment

The major approaches are axiomatically false & materially/formally inconsistent & ALL got #Profit wrong. The representative #Economist is NOT a #Scientist but an #AgendaPusher/#Clown in the political #CircusMaximus. Who is the greatest? pic.twitter.com/PWj5kuHjVU

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) November 28, 2023

Occasional Tweets: Economics ― just disinfotainment and self-hype (X)

 

#Economics is #FailedFakeScience. The representative #Economist is NOT a #Scientist but an #AgendaPusher / #UsefulIdiot / #Clown in the political #CircusMaximus. #EconomicPolicyGuidance has NEVER had sound scientific foundations. There is NO such thing as a #Wirtschaftsweiser.

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) July 10, 2023

Related 'The economist as amateur journalist' 

Occasional Xs: What economists really do (XLIII)

 

#FailedFakeScience#Economics claims to be #Science but is NOT. The representative #Economist is NOT a #Scientist but an #AgendaPusher / #UsefulIdiot / #Clown in the political #CircusMaximus. This holds from Adam Smith onward to the #EconomicsMustServeHumantity folks. pic.twitter.com/FXx1JX22VK

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) October 5, 2023

Occasional Tweets: Nothing new ― economists are for 200+ years now in the disinfotainment business

 

“We know it is not #economics related but we like to celebrate stuff that is considered quite geeky or nerdy.” For all those who know that #Economics has always been a stupid/corrupt shitshow that's an overdue admission. ⇒https://t.co/IllMaSsgxs

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) January 30, 2022

Occasional Tweets: Economics ― just disinfotainment and self-hype (V)

 

#Econ#FailedFakeScience#Walrasianism, #Keynesianism, #Marxianism, #Austrianism et al. are axiomatically false & materially/formally inconsistent & ALL got #Profit wrong. #EconomicPolicyGuidance has NEVER had sound scientific foundations. Any victory laps are unwarranted. pic.twitter.com/4JoQxBNxNT

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) June 10, 2023

Occasional Tweets: Economics ― not a science but a playground for disinfotainment clowns

 

#Econ

The scientific task of #Economists is to figure out how the #Economy works. The fact is that #Economics is #FailedFakeScience bc #Economists are NOT #Scientists but #AgendaPushers in the political #CircusMaximus who flood #SocialMedia with silly psycho-social slogans. pic.twitter.com/7zFPrvwfD3

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) December 8, 2022

For details of the big picture see cross-references Political Economics/Stupidity/Corruption. 

How to spot economics trolls

Comment on Craig Murray on ‘How To Spot A Twitter Troll’*

Blog-Reference

Craig Murray summarizes: “It is a matter of simple fact that the British government employs a very large number of people whose full time job is to influence the political narrative on social media. The 77th Brigade of the British Army, the Integrity Initiative, MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ all run major programmes of covert online propaganda. These information warriors operate on Twitter, Facebook, and in comments sections across the internet. I have long been fascinated by the disconnect by which people, who do know and understand that the security services employ tens of thousands of people and have budgets of billions, nevertheless find it hard to accept that they may come personally into contact with their operations.”

Does this come as a surprise? No: “Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality. Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen by the prisoners. The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison; for they know no better life.” #1

The situation has not fundamentally changed since the ancient Greeks. Newspapers, radio, TV, and social media only multiply the shadows on the blank wall. The communicative situation is schematically summarized with a graphic AXEC153. #2

So, we have three elements reality-medium-consciousness. Who controls the medium manufactures reality as it appears in consciousness. The British government has been a major player in this business since around WWI, and social media added merely a new facet to the communication mix, which consisted originally of rumor, horror stories (enemy), hero stories (own), disinformation, and censorship.

While everybody knows since George Orwell that history and actuality are, for the most part, literary fiction and medial stagings of scribes/Ministry of Truth/entertainment industry, one tends to think that science is non- and anti-hallucinatory.

The task of science is to eliminate all distortions between reality and consciousness. A materially/formally consistent theory is the best mental representation of reality that is humanly possible. Science is binary, i.e., true/false with nothing in between. The ultimate goal of science is the true theory.

This, of course, also holds for economics: “In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion.” (Stigum)

The fact of the matter, though, is this: The major approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, etc. ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and all got profit ― the foundational concept of the subject matter ― wrong. Economics is not a coherent body of certain knowledge but a heap of provably false theories.

So, economics has no scientific content but is propaganda in a scientific bluff package. There has been no scientific progress for 200+ years. False theories are not replaced by true theories but simply repeated. Oskar Morgenstern criticized his academic peers back in 1941: “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.”

From this follows that the vast majority of economists were already trolls long before the launch of the econblogosphere. The characteristic of economics is that production and distribution of communicative content have traditionally not so much been under the control of the government as of the Oligarchy. Well-known examples are pivotal institutions like the London School of Economics, #3 the Cowles Commission, #4, or the University of Chicago. #5 This, though, is only the historical tip of the iceberg. The conclusion is not too far-fetched that, in the meantime, academia and the greater part of economics publication/ communication are orchestrated and sponsored by a handful of activist billionaires. This carries quite naturally over to the econblogosphere.

Since the scientific failures of Adam Smith/Karl Marx, who both did not understand profit and how the monetary economy works, economics has not been science but political agenda pushing. This starts with econ textbooks and ends with the EconNobel.

Spotting economics trolls is easy, they identify themselves by waving their camp flag (Walrasian, Keynesian, Marxian, Austrian, MMTer, Pluralist), announcing to improve/save the world, hype their current bellwether (excellent article, Paul), stubbornly repeat proto-scientific garbage, utter their silly left/center/right opinion, stage their pointless debates, gossip extensively about their private lives, and play their dirty tricks in the background. #6, #7, #8. There is not the slightest idea of scientific truth, i.e. of material/formal consistency, in what they produce. An economist is the epitome of a useful political idiot.

James Buchanan, himself a billionaire-funded economic agenda-pusher, called his colleagues “a bevy of camp-following whores” and more cannot be said about the academic and non-academic folks that populate the econblogosphere. It is troll business as usual.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


* Craig Murray
#1 Wikipedia Allegory of the Cave
#2 Graphic AXEC153 Allegory of the Cave
#3 “The London School of Economics was founded in 1895 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, initially funded by a bequest of £20,000 from the estate of Henry Hunt Hutchinson. Hutchinson, a lawyer and member of the Fabian Society, left the money in trust, to be put ‘towards advancing its [The Fabian Society's] objects in any way they [the trustees] deem advisable.’
“In 1895, he [Sidney Webb] helped to establish the London School of Economics, using a bequest left to the Fabian Society. He was appointed Professor of Public Administration in 1912, a post he held for fifteen years. In 1892, Webb married Beatrice Potter, who shared his interests and beliefs. The money she brought with her enabled him to give up his clerical job and concentrate on his other activities. Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded the New Statesman magazine in 1913.” (Wikipedia)
#4 “Alfred Cowles III … was an American economist, businessman and founder of the Cowles Commission. He graduated from Yale in 1913, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He was the grandson of Alfred Cowles, Sr., who was a founder of the Chicago Tribune.” (Wikipedia)
#5 “Veblen’s first job was at the University of Chicago, the university bought and paid for by John D. Rockefeller the classic robber baron, …. Rockefeller called the university ‘the best investment’ he ever made, since he intended to use it to advance the interests of his class and suppress opposition.” (Zimmermann)
#6 The economist as storyteller
#7 Economics as storytelling and entertainment for the masses
#8 Economists/MMTers: agenda pushers, distractors, blockers, muters, censors

Related 'Economics, Plato’s Cave and the Silver Blaze Case' and 'MMT and the woes of useful political idiots' and 'The end of political economics (I)' and 'The end of political economics (II)' and 'Are economics professors really that incompetent? Yes!' 'Marshall and the Cambridge School of plain economic gibberish' and 'Oxford economics — still at the proto-scientific level' and 'Economists: Jacks-of-all-trades ― except economics' and 'Mad but true: 200+ years after Adam Smith economists still have no idea what profit is' and 'Economics debate ― just another variant of hardcore wrestling' and 'Economics: The greatest scientific fraud in modern times' and 'Right troll left troll pack your bag and get out of economics'. For details of the big picture, see cross-references Political Economics/Stupidity/Corruption.

***

Graphic AXEC139d

***

Also, to keep an eye on 'Trolls of a feather flock together' see for example Wikipedia for history

Political Economy Club

Cambridge Apostles

Mont Pelerin Society

Colloque Walter Lippmann

Economics societies

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

or BuzzFeed News for present-day “Science Philanthropy”.

***

Twitter/X Feb 10, 2024, The media watershed moment

Occasional Xs: What economists really do (LXIII)

 

#FailedFakeScience#Economics claims to be #Science but is NOT. The representative #Economist is NOT a #Scientist but an #AgendaPusher / #UsefulIdiot / #Clown in the political #CircusMaximus. The Editor in Chief of the #NewPalgraveDictionary & #NakedKeynesian is he living proof. pic.twitter.com/epVc3WVYUN

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) October 31, 2023

For details of the big picture see cross-references The Representative Economist. 

Occasional Tweets: Economics • Communication • Disinfotainment (I)

#Economics

#FailedScience

#FakeScience

#MetaCommunication

#EconTwitter

#Economists have no idea how the #Economy works. So they communicate self-referentially about whether their communication is fine/toxic. ⇒

Economics: communication without content

***

***

Communication / Disinfotainment

• How Adam Smith messed up economics
• Gossip economics
• Economics, communication, disinformation
• Heterodox economics ― stupidity, masochism, or disinformation?
• Economics: Stories, narratives, and disinformation
• Economic narratives cause severe mental damage
• Economists are NOT scientists but stupid/corrupt storytellers
• Not all academic pursuits are science
• Economic narratives are for the scientific garbage dump
• Circus Maximus: Economics as entertainment, personality gossip, virtue signaling, and lifestyle promotion
• Profit analysis ― another exercise in economic deception
• How to spot economics trolls
• The economist as storyteller
• Dialectic: the swampies’ methodology of choice
• If religion is opium of the people, economics is crack of the people
• Economics as storytelling and entertainment for the masses
• Urgent: Taking politics out of economics
• Economics: A pointless left-right wrestling show
• You don’t see what you don’t see: censorship in the econblogosphere
• The inexorable Paradigm Shift in economics
• Beware of the moralizing economist
• Supply-demand-equilibrium ― employment theory as an example of proto-scientific soap bubbling
• The Supreme Being handed over these Twelve Economics Commandments
• Ricardo, too, got profit theory wrong
• Economics for believers
• Again and again: economists are incompetent scientists
• This is New Economic Thinking? Give me a break!
• On econblogosphere bias
• Economics is NOT a misunderstanding but cargo cultic crap
• Economists: Incompetent? Stupid? Corrupt?
• Economics ― worse than fake
• Economics ― a Zombie wrestling show
• FakeNews, FakeScience: economics in the information age
• Economics: Science or cheap talk?

For more about disinfotainment see AXECquery.

Occasional X: What economists really do (CDXLII)

#Economics#AllYouNeedToKnow

“Let's talk Alcatraz economics. It's not just a potential prison, it's also a tourist trap generating $60m per year.” (Justin Wolfers)

Economists apparently do not understand the history of their profession and realize that the founding father of…

— AXEC (@EgmontHandtke) May 6, 2025

Occasional Xs: Economics ― just disinfotainment and self-hype (XXXV)

 

The history of economic thought is the history of scientific failure. The major approaches are axiomatically false & materially/formally inconsistent & ALL got #Profit wrong. #Economics is scientifically worthless. But at CORE they still hype clueless #Historians as #TopThinkers. pic.twitter.com/NwfpuVNiJG

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) December 13, 2023

Occasional Xs: Economics ― just disinfotainment and self-hype (XXX)

 

#Econ#NoFalseHeroMemorials#Economics is #FailedFakeScience. The major approaches are axiomatically false & materially/formally inconsistent & ALL got #Profit wrong.

The GDP death blow for the economics professionhttps://t.co/QJycQUhyJR pic.twitter.com/yTmrYZgMjG

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) November 14, 2023

Occasional X: What economists really do (CDXXXVI)

 

#Economics#AllYouNeedToKnow

Academia is not an institution funded by the taxpayer but by the Oligarchy. Rockefeller called the University of Chicago ‘the best investment’ he ever made. Academia ― as far as economics is concerned ― is expected to deliver free-market propaganda,…

— AXEC (@EgmontHandtke) February 25, 2025

How Adam Smith messed up economics

Comment on Ken Zimmerman on 'Adam Smith’s idea is still the basis of the discipline of economics'

Blog-Reference

The history of economic thought is the history of scientific failure. The major approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, and materially/formally inconsistent. Because of this, the whole analytical superstructure of economics is scientifically worthless. Because of this, economic policy guidance has NEVER had sound scientific foundations.

Now, the problem is this: “In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion.” (Stigum)

Because economists do not have the true theory, economics boils down to brain-dead agenda-pushing. Economists are not scientists but clowns, useful idiots, and agenda pushers in the political Circus Maximus. Economics is proto-scientific garbage, and because of their scientific incompetence, economists are a hazard to their fellow citizens. #1

The mental misery can be traced back to Adam Smith: “Smith … disliked whatever went beyond plain common sense. He never moved above the heads of even the dullest readers. He led them on gently, encouraging them by trivialities and homely observations, making them feel comfortable all along.” (Schumpeter)

Or, as Ken Zimmerman spins it: “The real start of modern Western economics as a discipline is usually traced to Adam Smith (1723–1790). Beginning as a moral philosopher concerned with human motives, Smith later wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776 as a series of lectures on public policy. The task he set for himself was that of a natural scientist, to discover the workings of a vast machine ― the economy. From this philosophical foundation, Smith builds a powerful argument that the individual’s self-interest generates the society’s best interests. Beginning with a rational individual motivated by positive natural impulses, he undertakes a series of dramatic political attacks on monopolists, corrupt governments, tariffs promoted by strong business lobbyists, guilds, colonialists, and ‘the capricious ambitions of kings and ministers’ (1937, 460). Though based on self-interest, a well-working economy, he said, should not cater to the selfish interests of a small class or group. Instead, it furthers the wealth of the nation as a whole ― and it is not a great step from here to the idea of democracy, of rule ‘of, by, and for’ the people of the nation.”

“Beginning with a rational individual”, Adam Smith inaugurated methodological individualism and led the profession straight into the Fallacy of Composition. The fact of the matter is, that NO way leads from the second-guessing of Human Nature/motives/behavior/action to the understanding of how the economic system works.

What Adam Smith did was a mixture of psychology and sociology ― PsySoc for short #2 ― including moralizing and agenda-pushing but NOT economics proper. Economics is about the behavior of the economic system and NOT the behavior of people. Adam Smith never understood the behavior of the system as a whole, i.e., “the workings of a vast machine”, and he never understood macroeconomic profit. #3 The supply-demand-equilibrium narrative that culminated in General Equilibrium Theory is a bad joke to this day. An economist who does not understand profit, i.e., the foundational concept of economics, is a laughing stock.

However, the economy is an abstract entity that defies intuitive understanding, and human behavior is something every moron claims to understand from his own personal experience. As a consequence, Adam Smith's blather about the baker and the butcher and their rational self-interest won the popular vote. The beauty of PsySoc is that one can speculate and talk and moralize about human nature/behavior without ever arriving at scientific knowledge about how the economic system works. People do not like science; they like storytelling and talk shows.

In his scientific incompetence, Adam Smith took the wrong path. He led economics away from science and helped it finally become a subcontractor of the disinfotainment industry. #4

To this day, economics has no scientific truth-value #5 but only political use-value. Politically, Smith's invisible-hand economics forwarded the illusion of Democracy and the reality of Oligarchy. And this is why “Adam Smith's idea is still the basis of the discipline of economics”.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 Econogenics: economists pose a hazard to their fellow citizens

#2 PsySoc — the scourge of economics

#3 The profit theory is false since Adam Smith

#4 Circus Maximus: Economics as entertainment, personality gossip, virtue signaling, and lifestyle promotion

#5 Wikipedia, economics, scientific knowledge, or political agenda pushing?

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REPLY to mameerop, Dec 13 [not published because of comments closed]

Economics has a long tradition of the pointless exercise called exegesis: “Exegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text. Traditionally, the term was used primarily for work with religious texts, especially the Bible. In modern usage, exegesis can involve critical interpretations of virtually any text, …” #1, #2

At some point in any economic discussion, the issue is no longer how the economy works but about what XYZ has said about how the economy works. In other words, folks get lost in metacommunication.

This is NOT an accident but a built-in feature of political economics.

“Another danger is that you may ‘precise everything away’ and be left with only a comparative poverty of meaning. ... Such a problem was avoided, said Keynes, by Marshall who used loose definitions but allowed the reader to infer his meaning from ‘the richness of context’.” (Coates, 2007, p. 87)

In other words, the reader is encouraged to substitute almost any meaning he likes. The result is well-known. Keynes' loose verbal reasoning triggered an enthusiastic exegesis movement that circled for some decades around the question ‘What Keynes really meant?’ Predictably, the question has never been answered. The richness of meaning only generated a wealth of blah blah.

The same holds, of course, for Adam Smith's Invisible Hand.

Take notice that every text that contains this metaphor has NO scientific content but is pure disinformation and that every author who applies this metaphor is NOT a scientist but a mentally retarded political agenda-pusher.

Adam Smith has to be buried at the Flat-Earth Cemetery together with all folks who ever tried to ‘explain’ what Smith ‘really’ meant.

Economics is a failed/fake science and needs a Paradigm Shift. This means that Adam Smith's idea is NO LONGER the “basis of the discipline of economics”.

#1 Wikipedia

#2 For more about exegesis, see AXECquery

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Graphic AXEC121i

Occasional Xs: Economics ― just disinfotainment and self-hype (XVI)

 

#Economics#Prizes are a tool of #Marketing / #PR / #Propaganda to shape #PublicOpinion. #Economics is #FailedFakeScience, so prizes have NO scientific significance but are an #Incentive/#Reward with which the #Oligarchy controls #Academia. pic.twitter.com/hV3snPwSJd

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) September 11, 2023

Occasional Xs: What economists really do (LIII)

 

#Economics is NOT #Science but #DisInfoTainment. The representative #Economist is NOT a #Scientist but an #AgendaPusher / #Clown in the political #CircusMaximus. #Academia has been weaponized by #Donors for the benefit of the #Oligarchy and the #Disadvantage of #WeThePeople. pic.twitter.com/TY5NemDkSj

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) October 25, 2023

Occasional Tweets: Meet the representative economist

 

#Econ#FailedFakeScience#Economics claims to be #Science (→ #EconNobel) but #EconTwitter delivers the unassailable proof that the representative #Economist is NOT a #Scientist but an #AmateurActor in a #DisInfoTainment #ShitShow. pic.twitter.com/jlS7wOloYw

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) March 13, 2023

For details of the big picture see cross-references The Representative Economist 

Occasional Xs: The futile attempt to recycle MMT (XLII)

 

#MMT#BadScienceBadPolicyBadPeople#DisInfoTainment#Manga#EconTwitter

What is MMT? (III) ― Rectifying Bill Mitchellhttps://t.co/v0UiqGbBWN pic.twitter.com/NEafqncNUs

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) October 20, 2023

Occasional Tweets: MMT is political fraud ― just like mainstream economics

 

#MMT#BadScienceBadPolicyBadPeople

MMT is neither groundbreaking nor science but a political fraud ― just like mainstream #Economics.

MMT and the promotion of Wall Street's idea of social policyhttps://t.co/wnoSHfsmZF pic.twitter.com/a49GTzZOLh

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) December 16, 2022

For more about MMT see AXECquery.