If religion is the opium of the people, then economics is the crack of the people

Comment on Barkley Rosser on ‘Robert H. Nelson Dies: Religion And Economics’

Blog-Reference

Barkley Rosser summarizes: “A basic theme in all of his [Nelson’s] books is that economics is a form of secular religion that posits a material salvation in some distant future as a result of economic growth and redistribution, a material heaven on earth.”

As Simon Wren-Lewis once observed: “Narratives are a way people can try to understand things they know little about, and most people know little about economics or politics.”

This is an accurate observation. Where knowledge is lacking, a story fills the void. Media of all types have always been in the business of storytelling, entertainment, and agenda-pushing. This goes from the so-called Holy Books to Rome’s Circus Maximus to Hollywood to Paul Krugman’s NYT blather, and to supply-demand-equilibrium textbooks.

Religion and economics indeed have a common denominator. It consists of the triad storytelling/ entertainment/ agenda-pushing.

It may have been the case that religion initially had a genuine spiritual content and an indispensable social function at the interface to the unknown and unknowable. But at some point in history, the priesthood took over, and religion became psychological conditioning and social agenda pushing. With secularization, economists in part took over where the priesthood lost ground.

Religion is about NONENTITIES and belief, science is about REALITY and knowledge. The communicative format of religion is the emotionally charged narrative; the format of science is the materially/formally consistent theory.

Economics is storytelling since the founding fathers. Adam Smith was NOT a scientist: “… he had no such ambitions; in fact, he 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)

All appearances to the contrary, economics is NOT a science but political agenda pushing. The formats of popular propaganda are the narrative, the talk show, and the shouting match in the political Circus Maximus. For a narrative, there is NO need to satisfy the scientific criteria of material/formal consistency. Basically, a narrative emotionally re-enacts a deep-seated archetype. The three great economic narratives are the story of the Schlauraffen Land of Plenty and Freedom, the story of the Alchemist who transmutes dirt into gold, and the story of the struggle of Capitalists vs Workers.

Economics is a failed science. All attempts to make economics a science remained on the surface. The major approaches — Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT — are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and all got profit ― the foundational concept of the subject matter ― wrong.

With the pluralism of provably false theories, economists have not achieved anything of scientific value but have produced a lot of proto-scientific garbage, vacuous propaganda, breath-taking rhetorical stunts, and brain-dead ideological debates about the material/ moral superiority of Capitalism or Communism.

After 200+ years, the reality content of economics is not significantly higher than that of any religion. The Invisible Hand of supply-demand-equilibrium has always been a NONENTITY just like the innumerable fictions of the priesthoods since time immemorial. Needless to emphasize that Barkley Rosser is part of the degeneration of what was intended as a scientific community to what has now become a coterie of ideological drug dealers.#1

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


#1 References
• Economics as storytelling and entertainment for the masses
• Economics is not a science, not a religion, but proto-scientific garbage
• Knowledge vs. Belief
• Passionate belief is no substitute for knowledge
• Agenda-pushers and hijackers vs scientists
• Confounding Is and Ought: the economist as moralist
• Separation of politics and economics
• Economics: ‘a tale told by an idiot ... signifying nothing’
• Storytelling vs Theory = Politics vs Science
• The economist as storyteller
• Narrative economics and the imperatives of the sitcom
• Economics: stories, narratives, and disinformation
• Media-fake-farce-fraud-storytelling-macro
• How to save the economy from storytelling economists
• The end of storytelling
• Politics, storytelling, and science
• Economics — from storytelling to science
• Fake religion, fake science, fake news, and false complaints

Related 'The Supreme Being handed over these Twelve Economics Commandments' and 'Circus Maximus: Economics as entertainment, personality gossip, virtue signaling, and lifestyle promotion'.

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REPLY to Barkley Rosser on Feb 1

You say: “You really do need to face up to the fact that there is a scientific economics …”

Microeconomic supply-demand-equilibrium is axiomatically predicated on equilibrium. Equilibrium is a NONENTITY. General Equilibrium with the summum bonum of overall welfare, which is realized by the Invisible Hand, is a NONENTITY. Call it superstition, magical thinking, hallucination, religion, deception, but do NOT call it science.

Macroeconomics is false since Keynes wrote down I=S. The equality/equilibrium of I and S is a NONENTITY. Economists are too stupid for the elementary algebra that underlies macroeconomics. #1

The defective Walrasian microfoundations and the defective Keynesian macrofoundations do NOT fit together. Every economics textbook is an instance of glaring inconsistency. #2

And then there is Barkley Rosser, who maintains with the applause or tacit approval of his academic colleagues that his summary of MbS’s role in the Khashoggi affair: “He is guilty guilty guuilty” is a valid piece of legitimate political economics.

Robert Nelson’s comparison of economics with religion is a distraction at best and deception at worst. The provable fact of the matter is that economics is a failed/fake science. #3


#1 “But economics is not pure mathematics or logic” No, it is pure blather
#2 The father of modern economics and his imbecile kids
#3 There is NO such thing as “smart, honest, honorable economists”

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REPLY to Barkley Rosser on Feb 12

You said: “You really do need to face up to the fact that there is a scientific economics …”

I said: “The provable fact of the matter is that economics is a failed/fake science.”

On Twitter is some news about the AEA for you.

Economics is not science, not religion, but proto-scientific garbage

Comment on John Rapley, TheGuardian, on ‘How economics became a religion’

Article-Reference and Blog-Reference on Jul 12 and Blog-Reference and Blog-Reference on Jul 13 and Blog-Reference on Jul 19

Economists tell the world each year in no uncertain terms that economics is science by awarding this prize “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. The claim is provably false. So, is it true that economics is some kind of worldly religion with economists as a priesthood, as John Rapley claims? No, economics is neither a science nor a religion but a cargo cult science. Failed scientists are something different from priests. What they have in common, though, is that they are both storytellers in the political Circus Maximus.

Since Adam Smith/Karl Marx economists are in a state of incorrigible self-deception: “They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. ... But it doesn’t work. ... So I call these things cargo cult science because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential.” (Feynman)#1

The fact is, there is no such thing as economics. There are TWO economixes: political economics and theoretical economics. The main differences are: (i) The goal of political economics is to successfully push an agenda, and 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 have to be strictly adhered to.

Theoretical economics consists of the main approaches Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, and Austrianism which are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and which got the foundational economic concept of profit wrong. What we actually have is the pluralism of provably false theories. This means that economic policy guidance since the iconic storytellers Adam Smith/Karl Marx has never had valid scientific foundations.

Theoretical economics is scientifically worthless. But this does not matter much as long as it is politically useful. And this is always the case because economics is a rummage table of opinions.

The fact is that economists simply do not know how the economy works. This is not a big issue as long as the economy keeps random-walking on the broad green carpet of acceptable or tolerable performance. It becomes an issue once the economy has landed in the ditch.

This, then, is the favorable moment to reposition economics. The claim to be a science goes down the drain: “The hubris in economics came not from a moral failing among economists, but from a false conviction: the belief that theirs was a science. It neither is nor can be one, and has always operated more like a church. You just have to look at its history to realise that.” (Rapley)

Suddenly, after 150+ years, everybody becomes aware that the whole analytical superstructure of economics had been built upon false premises: “For starters, it rests on a set of premises about the world, not as it is, but as economists would like it to be. Just as any religious service includes a profession of faith, membership in the priesthood of economics entails certain core convictions about human nature.” (Rapley)

What, then, are these premises? Orthodox economics is based upon the Walrasian axiom set = microfoundations: “HC1 economic agents have preferences over outcomes; HC2 agents individually optimize subject to constraints; HC3 agent choice is manifest in interrelated markets; HC4 agents have full relevant knowledge; HC5 observable outcomes are coordinated, and must be discussed with reference to equilibrium states.” (Weintraub)

Obviously, this axiom set contains three NONENTITIES: (i) constrained optimization (HC2), (ii) rational expectations (HC4), (iii) equilibrium (HC5). Every theory/model that contains a nonentity is A PRIORI false. However, this is the authoritative definition of economics: “It is a touchstone of accepted economics that all explanations must run in terms of the actions and reactions of individuals. Our behavior in judging economic research, in peer review of papers and research, and in promotions, includes the criterion that in principle the behavior we explain and the policies we propose are explicable in terms of individuals, …” (Arrow)

The first thing to notice is that economics is ill-defined. Economics is not at all about Human Nature/motives/behavior/action ― this is the subject matter of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so on ― but about the nature/behavior of the economic system.#2 Methodologically, behavioral economics is the wrong approach because NO way leads from understanding human behavior to understanding how the actual economy works.

The major approaches are axiomatically false and materially/formally inconsistent. What we actually have is the pluralism of false theories/models. Needless to emphasize that the pluralism of provably false theories is scientifically unacceptable.

Economics is NOT a science and neither orthodox nor heterodox economists are scientists. They have never been anything else than substandard thinkers, storytellers, and agenda pushers. Because the axiomatic foundations of both microeconomics and macroeconomics are false, all modern economics textbooks are false. This has nothing to do with religion or an economics priesthood but with manifest scientific incompetence.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


#1 What is so great about cargo cult science? or, How economists learned to stop worrying about failure
#2 If it isn’t macro-axiomatized, it isn’t economics

Related 'All models are false because all economists are stupid' and 'Economics between science and magic' and 'Economics between physics and psychiatry' and 'Economists and the destructive power of stupidity' and 'If religion is opium of the people, economics is crack of the people' and 'Fake religion, fake science, fake news, and false complaints'. For details of the big picture see cross-references Incompetence and cross-references Paradigm Shift.

Occasional Tweets: Religion, science, fake science, economics (I)

 

#Econ#Economics is about how the #Economy works and NOT about the Latin Mass. #Economists are too stupid for the elementary #Algebra of #MacroEconomics. Bc of this, they get the foundational concept of #Profit wrong. Bc of this, economics is proto-scientific garbage. pic.twitter.com/LBBq14c5z0

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) July 16, 2021

Economics / Religion

• If religion is opium of the people, economics is crack of the people
• Fake religion, fake science, fake news, and false complaints
• Economics is not science, not religion, but proto-scientific garbage
• No religion, merely incompetence
• The Supreme Being handed over these Twelve Economics Commandments
• Economists: Jacks-of-all-trades ― except economics

For more about economics imperialism see AXECorg.

Links on Asad Zaman’s ‘Defining Islamic Economics’

Blog-Reference*

There is NO such thing as Islamic, Christian, Buddhist, etcetera economics. Economics defines itself as a science and is therefore fundamentally different from religious beliefs/political ideologies. Science deals with knowledge. Non-scientists know NOTHING. Political/religious economists are NOT scientists but stupid/corrupt storytellers.

“There are always many different opinions and conventions concerning any one problem or subject-matter (such as the gods). 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)

To this day, though, economics is NOT a science but political/religious agenda pushing in a scientific/social bluff package. Economics claims to be a science but has not yet managed to live up to the ideal. Strictly speaking, economics is a fraud.

For details see:
► The Supreme Being handed over these Twelve Economics Commandments
► If religion is opium of the people, economics is crack of the people
► Economics is not science, not religion, but proto-scientific garbage
► Confounding Is and Ought: the economist as moralist
► Beware of the moralizing economist
► Knowledge vs. Belief
► What is so great about cargo cult science? or, How economists learned to stop worrying about failure
► Fake religion, fake science, fake news, and false complaints
► Scientists and science actors
► Throw them out! Orthodox and heterodox economists are unfit for science

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


* An Islamic WorldView

Related 'Economics a science? Surely you're joking, Mr. Cochrane' and 'Economics ― nothing but claptrap, twaddle, drivel, slip-slop, wish-wash, waffle, and proto-scientific garbage' and 'Economics: Science or cheap talk?' and 'Pre-truth and post-truth in economics' and 'Refutation of Asad Zaman’s heterodox methodology: all arguments you ever need' and 'Zamanomics' and 'Economics: The greatest scientific fraud in modern times' and 'The inexorable Paradigm Shift in economics'. For details of the big picture see cross-references Political Economics/Stupidity/Corruption.

The Supreme Being handed over these Twelve Economics Commandments

Comment on Barkley Rosser on 'Anniversary of Yeshua bin Yusuf dying on a cross'

Blog-Reference

The Supreme Being ― which is by logical necessity absolutely indifferent with regard to galaxy, planet, gender, age, race, nation, religion, party, social status, income/wealth ― spoke out of the clouds and handed over these Twelve Economics Commandments:

1. Never cite the Bible or other religious texts in an economic argument.

2. Maintain the strict separation of science and religion under all circumstances.

3. Maintain the strict separation of science and politics under all circumstances. #1

4. Do not dabble in psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, political science, philosophy, theology, social philosophy, or any other of the so-called social sciences. Economics is a systems science.

5. Do not believe: prove. The number of followers on social media does NOT count as scientific proof.

6. Figure out how the actual economic system works and communicate your results in the format of a materially/formally consistent theory.

7. Absolutely refrain from storytelling, metaphors, analogies, narratives, gossip, insinuation, filibuster, sermonizing, propaganda,  disinformation, foretelling/ prophecies/predictions, and other rhetorical means.

8. Do not apply methodological individualism/microfoundations/partial analysis. #2

9. Do not moralize, the subject matter of economics is IS not OUGHT. How the Good Society can be realized has to be determined in the political sphere by the Legitimate Sovereign. See 3.

10. Be, first of all, aware that there are knowledge and opinion, science and non-science, scientific standards/ethics and anything-goes, true and false with nothing in between. The ethics of science is objectivity, i.e., material and formal consistency. The goal of economics is the true theory.

11. Rest assured that those who violate scientific standards/ethics go to hell and will be tortured in all eternity with the senseless blather of Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, and Pluralism. #3

12. Make no mistake: alone scientists will go to heaven. As everyone can easily imagine, the Supreme Being will NOT share eternity with morons, imbeciles, political agenda pushers, blatherers, trolls, believers, impostors, journalists, the bigots of common sense, and failed/fake scientists.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


#1 The strict separation of the scientific realm and the political realm is necessary because politics always and everywhere corrupts science. This point has been made abundantly clear by J. S. Mill: “A scientific observer or reasoner, merely as such, is not an adviser for practice. His part is only to show that certain consequences follow from certain causes, and that to obtain certain ends, certain means are the most effectual. Whether the ends themselves are such as ought to be pursued, and if so, in what cases and to how great a length, it is no part of his business as a cultivator of science to decide, and science alone will never qualify him for the decision.” For details see
Throw them out! Orthodox and heterodox economists are unfit for science
#2 If it isn’t macro-axiomatized, it isn’t economics
#3 Economics is not a science, not a religion, but proto-scientific garbage

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REPLY to Barkley Rosser on Mar 1

Economics claims since Adam Smith/Karl Marx to be a science. Yet, everybody who has a rough idea of what science is all about and looks closer into the matter comes to the conclusion that economics is a failed science. Economics consists of four main approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism ― which are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, and materially/formally inconsistent.

Economics has to this day produced NOTHING of scientific value. This is the track record: provably false

• profit theory, for 200+ years,

• Walrasian microfoundations (including equilibrium), for 150+ years,

• Keynesian macrofoundations (including I=S/IS-LM), for 80+ years.

Economics needs a Paradigm Shift because the pluralism of false theories is untenable. Heterodoxy is provably false, just as Orthodoxy.#1 Economists do not know to this day how the price- and profit mechanism works. Economic policy guidance has had no sound scientific foundation for 200+ years.

Economics is what Feynman called a cargo cult science, economists are failed/fake scientists, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is a deception of the public.  Economics is one of the worst cases of failure/fraud in the history of modern science.

Gresham’s Law says that bad money crowds good money out of circulation. Something similar holds for economics, which has become over the years the venue of incompetent scientists, agenda pushers, cranks, scammers, and useful political idiots.

Two typical exemplars of this species are Barkley Rosser and Andres. Barkley Rosser does to this day not understand the difference between the foundational concepts of profit and income, has busily produced peer-reviewed papers but contributed nothing to the advancement of science, and now spreads idiocy/disinformation on economics blogs.#2 His Yusuf post is a case in point. This self-disqualifying post is a good indicator of the vast proportions the accumulated bullshit has grown into in the last 200+ years of “economic sciences”.

#1 The stupidity of Heterodoxy is the life insurance of Orthodoxy

#For details of the big picture, see cross-references Failed/Fake Scientists

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Graphic AXEC139d

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REPLY to Andres on Mar 2

You say: “6. Human beings are irritating creatures. If you make an argument for why they should behave consistently under a given system, they will find some situation to make their behavior inconsistent, if for no other reason than to annoy the economist.”

Obviously, you have not realized that economics is a systems science and that there are objective systemic laws. It is long known that there is NO such thing as behavioral laws. Exactly for this reason it is sheer madness to build economics on the behavioral assumption of constrained optimization.

The morons of economics do not know what the scientists in all ages knew: “The bifurcation of motion into two fundamentally different types, one for natural motions of non-living objects and another for acts of human volition ... is obviously related to the issue of free will, and demonstrates the strong tendency of scientists in all ages to exempt human behavior from the natural laws of physics, and to regard motions resulting from human actions as original, in the sense that they need not be attributed to other motions.” (Brown)

For details see:

• Economics is NOT a social science
• Cross-references NOT a Science of Behavior
• The existence of economic laws and the nonexistence of behavioral laws

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REPLY to Andres on Mar 2

It is always a grand spectacle to observe a goldfish brain starting to work and getting into high gear. You just re-discovered behavioral uncertainty: “… we might say that the human factor is the ultimately uncertain and wayward element in social life and in all social institutions.” (Popper, 1960), and change: “Important revolutions have occurred before our time, and since the days of Heraclitus change has been discovered over and over again.” (Popper, 1960) #1

I wonder how long it takes you to discover that the story of “one hapless dude who was nailed to a cross” is fake news for 2000+ years. #2

The true mystery is why the alleged economist Barkley Rosser recycles scientifically long-refuted storytelling on an alleged economics blog. Even goldfishes know by now that the subject matter of economics is the economy and NOTHING else.

#1 The Synthesis of Economic Law, Evolution, and History

#2 YouTube Richard Carrier

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REPLY to Barkley Rosser, Andres, ANC Driver on Mar 3

SURGEON GENERAL'S GAGANOMICS WARNING

The continued production of verbal soap bubbles may result in a hazardous lack of oxygen in the brain and in para-scientific hallucinations which inevitably lead via the Yusuf-Syndrome to a total mental collapse and, in addition, cause incurable cognitive disturbances among unsuspecting economics students and explosive vomiting in the scientific community.

Knowledge vs Belief

Comment on Asad Zaman on ‘The marginalisation of morality’

Blog-Reference

This blog [RWER] distinguishes itself from all the rest by its title Real-World Economics Review Blog. The keyword is economics. Now, everybody understands that (i) the economy is but one aspect of the real world, and (ii) that economics is the science that tries to find out how the economy works. Hence, economics is restricted with respect to its subject matter and committed to the scientific method.

Since its beginnings, economics has overstepped its narrow limits. The simple reason is that authors, teachers, ideologues, and politicians have consistently tried to instrumentalize economics for other purposes. This gave us political economics in the widest sense, whereby the term political embraces all belief systems, including, of course, religions (Nelson, 2006).

To the extent that theoretical economics has been hijacked by political economics, it has to regain its full independence. That part of economics that has been political from Smith, to Marx, to Hayek, to Keynes, and on to the actual orthodox and heterodox activists has to be clearly separated from science and eventually thrown out.

Theoretical economics is about the world economy. It is not about the Greek, European, or US economy. And it is certainly not at all about the problems of the American educational system. It is the task of American citizens to organize the education of their children. And no economist has any legitimacy in telling anybody how this could or should be done.

Most belief systems are expansionary and rely on the time-tested experience that the best way to propagate belief is to hijack the educational system, including, of course, the universities.

Now, science is about knowledge, and this is the exact opposite of belief. Science restricts itself to things that can be known, and belief systems second-guess things that cannot be known. Science has its own moral standard that is not derived from any belief system. What is most important, though, is that humanity has learned in the course of history that morality is a fundamental human trait that comes before religion or politics. Non-religious people have moral standards that are, on average, higher than those of religious people, who have, again on average, unthinkingly adapted to their rather specific cultural environments.

We may agree with Assad Zaman that morality is at a low ebb in the USA and the world at large. We certainly do not agree that this is due to a lack of religious education.

As economists, we have a problem that has nothing at all to do with morals and belief systems. It is a fact that the scientific level of economics is at a low ebb in the USA and the world at large. As a result, we have no economic theory that satisfies the scientific standards of material and formal consistency. And here moral comes in again. By propagating refuted or irrefutable theories or belief systems, the representative economist violates scientific ethics.

To do some sociology about the deplorable state of American universities is not real-world economics. It is the proper task of Heterodox economics to emancipate economics from all belief systems and to make it a real science that, after 200+ years of groping in the dark, eventually finds out how the actual economy works. #1

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


References
Nelson, R. H. (2006). Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

#1 For a start, see the belief-free New Curriculum.

Scientists and science actors

Comment on Lars Syll on ‘Chicago drivel — a sure way to get a ‘Nobel prize’ in economics’

Blog-Reference and Blog-Reference

Personal experience makes only a tiny part of what every human knows about the world/ universe and other humans, the greater part stems from myth/religion/philosophy/ science. Myth/religion/philosophy is storytelling and does not satisfy the scientific criteria of logical and empirical consistency. Storytelling is easy, to establish consistency is hard. From the history of the last 5000 years, we know that stories sell well, the absurder the better. The average person prefers belief/opinion (= doxa) to knowledge (= episteme) and thinks more about natural/supernatural persons/personifications and less about the universe and its sub-systems. Because of this, nearly 100 percent of human communication consists of gossip.

A case in point is economics. What Thomas Sargent tells his students boils down to: (i) humans respond to incentives, (ii) one cannot always get what one wants, (iii) in equilibrium economic agents are satisfied, (iv) sometimes people/governments keep their promises, sometimes not, (v) people try to get more out of the social pot than they put in, (vi) it is difficult/impossible to know other peoples’ motives/preferences and to forecast their actions. (See intro)

This is folk psychology and folk sociology — PsySoc for short. The economist Sargent tells his students how humans work but not how the economy works. The main reason is that Sargent and his fellow economists at Chicago, Berkeley, Harvard, and elsewhere do not know how the economy works.

This would not be a big issue, after all, people talk most of the time about NONENTITIES and things they know nothing about. To believe in standard economics is in no way different from the belief in the myths of ancient goat herders. The real trouble with economics begins here: “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”.

The keyword is science[s]. Why not simply “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics”? The original title clearly communicates the claim that economics is a science. This claim is as old as Adam Smith/Karl Marx. But economists never lived up to the claim.

Science is well-defined by the criteria of formal and material consistency: “Research is in fact a continuous discussion of the consistency of theories: formal consistency insofar as the discussion relates to the logical cohesion of what is asserted in joint theories; material consistency insofar as the agreement of observations with theories is concerned.” (Klant, 1994)

Neither orthodox nor heterodox economics satisfies the criteria of formal and material consistency. Worse, economists violate scientific standards since the founding fathers. There is no exception: Walrasian, Keynesian, Marxian, or Austrian economics is provably inconsistent.

There are political economics and theoretical economics. The founding fathers were straightforward people and called themselves political economists, that is, they left no doubt that their main business was agenda pushing. Economists never got out of political economics. In other words, theoretical economics (= science) ultimately could not emancipate itself from political economics (= agenda-pushing). And this is how economics became one of the most embarrassing failures in the history of scientific thought.

Economics is not a science, but what Feynman famously called a cargo cult science. Accordingly, economists are not scientists but science actors. The difference is this: “A genuine inquirer aims to find out the truth of some question, whatever the color of that truth. ... A pseudo-inquirer seeks to make a case for the truth of some proposition(s) determined in advance. There are two kinds of pseudo-inquirer, the sham and the fake. A sham reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to make a case for some immovably-held preconceived conviction. A fake reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to advance himself by making a case for some proposition to the truth-value of which he is indifferent.” (Haack, 1997, p. 1)

Not only the Chicago version but economics in all its orthodox and heterodox variants is unacceptable proto-scientific garbage. The first thing to do is to rename the most prestigious economics prize into “Bank of Sweden Oscar for the best science actor/actress.”

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


References
Haack, S. (1997). Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism. Skeptical Inquirer, 21(6): 1–7. URL

Related 'Feeble minds, shaky assumptions, and the inevitable failure of economics' and 'How to get out of the Econ 101 PsySoc woods' and 'Economics is NOT a science of behavior' and 'From PsySoc to SysHum' and 'The happy end of the social science delusion' and 'The Science-of-Man fallacy' and 'PsySoc — the scourge of economics' and 'A farewell to PsySoc economics'.

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REPLY to Peter on Sep 21

Your argument adds nothing to the discussion but distracts from the main point. The question is: Is the theory/model true or false. The character of the author, his CV, and what his motives might be is ultimately irrelevant. Science is about proof and not about personality or credibility.

“Remember: occasionally, it may be an interesting question to ask why a man says what he says; but whatever the answer, it does not tell us anything about whether what he says is true or false.” (Schumpeter)#1

Chicago economics is provably false. The same holds for Cambridge economics. It is irrelevant whether Cambridge is regarded as politically more leftist and Chicago more rightist. The point is that both Chicago and Cambridge produce proto-scientific garbage.


#1 See also the first 60 seconds of Feynman on Scientific Method on YouTube

Confounding Is and Ought: the economist as moralist

Comment on Robert Reich on ‘What Happened to the Moral Center of American Capitalism?’

Blog-Reference

What is the proper job of the economist qua scientist? “A scientific observer or reasoner, merely as such, is not an adviser for practice. His part is only to show that certain consequences follow from certain causes, and that to obtain certain ends, certain means are the most effectual. Whether the ends themselves are such as ought to be pursued, and if so, in what cases and to how great a length, it is no part of his business as a cultivator of science to decide, and science alone will never qualify him for the decision.” (Mill, 2006, p. 950)

The economist qua scientist brings knowledge to the table, not his personal opinion. It is the legitimate political institution that determines the political ends. This is the Ought-part, science is concerned exclusively with the Is-part of reality. The Is/Ought difference is reasonably clear since Hume but, beginning with Adam Smith, it has been mostly ignored by economists.

However, for science this difference is fundamental. Moralizing and scientific discourse are strictly antithetical. Economists never got the point. “Economists think of themselves as scientists, but ... they are more like theologians.” (Nelson, 2006, p. xv)

Economics is a failed science because moralists always outnumbered genuine enquirers. “A genuine inquirer aims to find out the truth of some question, whatever the color of that truth. ... A pseudo-inquirer seeks to make a case for the truth of some proposition(s) determined in advance. There are two kinds of pseudo-inquirer, the sham and the fake. A sham reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to make a case for some immovably-held preconceived conviction. A fake reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to advance himself by making a case for some proposition to the truth-value of which he is indifferent.” (Haack, 1997, p. 1)

The economist who moralizes and politicizes is out of science. As Keen put it: “Even some of the most committed economists have conceded that, if economics is to become less of a religion and more of a science, then the foundations of economics should be torn down and replaced.” (2011, p. 35)

A moralizing economist is a living proof that scientific ethics, which consists of never trespassing the demarcation line between Is and Ought, is desperately lacking.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


References
Haack, S. (1997). Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism. Skeptical Inquirer, 21(6): 1–7. URL
Keen, S. (2011). Debunking Economics. London, New York: Zed Books, rev. edition.
Mill, J. S. (2006). A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, volume 8 of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Nelson, R. H. (2006). Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Related 'Scientific suicide in the revolving door' and 'When fake scientists call out on fake politicians' and 'Economics and corruption' and 'FakeNews, FakeScience: economics in the information age' and 'How economists murdered the economy and got away with it' and 'Krugman and the scientific implosion of economics' and 'On economists’ stupidity' and 'Economists’ proto-scientific shell games'

***

ICYMI (DrDick, September 7)

“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, 1991)

It is widely known that economists still lack the true theory and from this follows de facto that it is beyond their means to offer scientifically valid advice. Strictly speaking, scientific ethics is not yet an issue for economists because economics has not risen above the proto-scientific level.

The idea, for example, that Hayek gave Mrs. Thatcher scientific advice is of unsurpassable silliness. Things have not improved since then.

New Economic Thinking: cross-references

Posts

• Sovereign Economics
• New Economic Thinking ― the definitive results
• Ending the pluralism of provably false economic theories with the long-overdue Paradigm Shift
• Swimming naked: economists and the Paradigm Shift
• Macroeconomics and the fake History of Economic Thought
• The state of MMT? Stone-dead!
• Homo oeconomicus: the never-ending folk-psychological shitshow
• The dirty secret of Capitalism: Economists have NO idea how Capitalism works
• Circus Maximus: Economics as entertainment, personality gossip, virtue signaling, and lifestyle promotion
• Economic policy and the skirmishes of failed/fake scientists
• Economics: The greatest scientific fraud in modern times
• If religion is opium of the people, economics is crack of the people
• There is NO such thing as “smart, honest, honorable economists”
• Throw them out! Orthodox and heterodox economists are unfit for science
• From false microfoundations to true macrofoundations (I)
• How to make economics a science
• This is New Economic Thinking? Give me a break!
• Joan Robinson and the early death of Behavioral Economics
• When non-thinkers rethink
• Why does Heterodoxy not abolish the fake Nobel?
• The ethics of science is consistency ― economics is inconsistent
• 10 steps to leave cargo cult economics behind for good
• New Economic Thinking = old scientific garbage
• CORE: more lipstick on the dead economics pig
• Hunting down the economics body snatchers
• Scientists do NOT predict the future
• Rectification of MMT macro accounting
• The moralizing economist is not a good guy but a fake scientist
• Walrasian micro and Keynesian macro need to be flushed away
• In search of new economists
• The myth of economics knowledge
• New Economic Thinking: the 10 crucial points
• How economists habitually mess it up
• Don Lars and the axiomatic windmill
• Macro for dummies
• Note on Amy Willis ‘Can majoring in philosophy make you a better person?’
• Economics is not a science, not a religion, but proto-scientific rubbish
• Zero-sum capitalism
• We are not yet out of the wood; in fact, we are not yet in it
• Laying the bastard Phillips Curve to rest
• Keynesianism ― the economists’ senile dementia
• A crash course in macro accounting
• Just another cargo cultic exercise
• Profit theory in less than 5 minutes
• Macrofounded labor market theory
• Marginal madness
• Economics and the Fallacy of Insufficient Abstraction
• Rethinking the Phillips Curve
• Think deeper
• Profit and distribution: a primer
• First Lecture in New Economic Thinking
• What is the fuss with New Economic Thinking all about?
• True macrofoundations: the reset of economics
• What is REALLY wrong with macro
• Schizonomics
• Modern macro moronism
• Rectification and generalization of MMT
• New Economic Thinking, or, let’s put lipstick on the dead pig
• Paul the Menace
• Economists and the destructive power of stupidity
• Going beyond Wicksell, Keynes, and MMT
• Macroeconomics without Keynes
• Rethinking MMT
• Rethinking the Profit Law
• Rethinking deficit spending
• Rethinking the multiplier
• There is NO such thing as an economic expert
• How economists murdered the economy and got away with it
• New Economic Thinking ― false promises and hopes
• Stuck with the economics prisoner’s dilemma
• Feeble thinkers, feeble rethinkers: The perennial misery of economics
• All models are false because all economists are stupid
• Kick out the king and don’t forget the jesters
• How to get rid of an obsolete theory
• Economic policy has gone wrong because economic theory has gone wrong
• From Orthodoxy to Heterodoxy to Metadoxy
• Caught in secular intellectual stagnation
• How the intelligent non-economist can refute every economist hands down

Working papers

• The Three Fatal Mistakes of Yesterday Economics: Profit, I=S, Employment
• Essentials of Constructive Heterodoxy: Profit
• Confused Confusers: How to Stop Thinking Like an Economist and Start Thinking Like a Scientist

Related cross-references Paradigm Shift and cross-references Pluralism

Graphic AXEC83a

Meta references

Agenda pushers and hijackers vs scientists

Comment on Peter Radford on  'DSGE is a plutocratic tool'

Blog-Reference

It is trivial but worth repeating: political economics and theoretical economics are different things. The goal of political economics is to push an agenda, and the goal of theoretical economics is to explain how the economy works. The core problem of economics as a science is, of course, that by its very nature, it is closely entangled with politics. The biggest threat to theoretical economics is that it gets hijacked by those with a political agenda. It does not matter whether this agenda is good or bad in preset moral terms. Science is committed to its own criteria, or it ceases to be science.

But are we not all inescapably involved in the struggle between good and evil? Politics, religion, and philosophy say so. But even if this were true, this would be no justification to hijack science or to let it be hijacked. What has to be recognized is that science is about true/false and not about good/evil. This distinction is part of the demarcation problem, which is the fundamental problem of methodology (Popper, 1980, p. 34). Since the ancient Greeks, the first act of science was to throw out politics, religion, and philosophy.

Because there are theoretical and political economics, there are two types of inquirers.

“A genuine inquirer aims to find out the truth of some question, whatever the color of that truth. ... A pseudo-inquirer seeks to make a case for the truth of some proposition(s) determined in advance. There are two kinds of pseudo-inquirer, the sham and the fake. A sham reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to make a case for some immovably-held preconceived conviction. A fake reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to advance himself by making a case for some proposition to the truth-value of which he is indifferent.” (Haack, 1997, p. 1)

Let us make no mistake: politics is legitimate, and influencing public opinion is legitimate, yet all this has nothing to do with science.

“Apologetics may be a laudable objective. Its practical importance is unquestioned. People need to be shown that the institutions of their own society are good, those of others bad. But there is no place for apologetics in science. Scientific economics inquires only into the How and Why, not into the Good or Bad, of what is. From the scientific point of view, preoccupation with Good and Bad is worse than useless since it not only fails to illumine anything but keeps the lightbeam of inquiry from being turned in directions where answers to significant questions can be found.” (Murad, 1953, p. 2)

The classical economists started openly as agenda pushers. They had only different agendas.

Smith: “But in the introduction to Book IV, we read that Political Economy ‘proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign,’ and it is this definition which expresses both what Smith wanted above everything and what interested his readers more than anything else.” (Schumpeter, 1994, p. 186)

Mill: “... John Stuart Mill wrote ..., that in the years around 1830 his circle (the so-called Philosophical Radicals) had adopted the following programme: they wanted to achieve an improvement in human society by ‘securing full employment at high wages to the whole labouring population’.” (Popper, 1994, p. 188)

The rest: “The old-fashioned political economist adored, as alone capable of redeeming the human race, the glorious principle of individual greed, although, as this principle requires for its action hypocrisy and fraud, he generally threw in some dash of inconsistent concessions to virtue, as a sop to the vulgar Cerberus.” (Peirce, 1931, 1.75)

Marx and Keynes, too, were noteworthy agenda pushers. The same holds for Hayek and Friedman. All these economists used economics for political purposes. This is unacceptable. It does not matter what the respective agenda is ― each attempt to instrumentalize science is unacceptable.

Since Adam Smith, all economists are committed to science as they understand it: “Now there is simply no doubt that whatever was the source of inspiration for Jevons, Menger, and Walras, all three invoked whatever physics they knew to lend prestige to their theoretical innovations. ... Adam Smith, Ricardo, James Mill and McCulloch had been just as eager in earlier days to invoke the name of Newton to legitimize their theoretical claims.” (Blaug, 1989, p. 1226)

What exactly does the commitment to science entail? “Research is in fact a continuous discussion of the consistency of theories: formal consistency insofar as the discussion relates to the logical cohesion of what is asserted in joint theories; material consistency insofar as the agreement of observations with theories is concerned.” (Klant, 1994, p. 31)

Therefore, the core question of theoretical economics is not who benefits from a theory. The core question is how the actual economy works. As a consequence, the decisive argument against DSGE is not that it benefits the Plutocrats but that it does not meet the criteria of material and formal consistency. DSGE is simply proto-scientific garbage.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


References
Blaug, M. (1989). Review. Economic Journal, 99(398): 1225–1226. URL
Haack, S. (1997). Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism. Skeptical Inquirer, 21(6): 1–7. URL → URL
Klant, J. J. (1994). The Nature of Economic Thought. Aldershot, Brookfield: Edward Elgar.
Murad, A. (1953). Questions for Profit Theory. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 13(1): 1–14. URL
Peirce, C. S. (1931). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. I. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. URL
Popper, K. R. (1980). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London, Melbourne, Sydney: Hutchison, 10th edition.
Popper, K. R. (1994). The Myth of the Framework. In Defence of Science and Rationality, Chapter Science: Problems, Aims, Responsibilities,  82–111. London, New York: Routledge.
Schumpeter, J. A. (1994). History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

***

Graphic AXEC166

Graphic AXEC108l

***

Institute for Political Economy, Aug 15, 2023

Paul Craig Roberts, Money Is Destroying Science and Scholarship

Occasional Tweets: How to respect the separation between religion and science

 

#Economics#FailedScience#FakeScience#Economists#StupidOrCorruptOrBoth

The Supreme Being handed over these Twelve Economics Commandmentshttps://t.co/NxykTJpvx6

— E.K-H (@AXECorg) December 10, 2021

For more about religion see AXECquery. 

Economics for believers

Comment on Andrew Anderson on Daniel José Camacho on ‘The deficit doesn’t matter: thinking morally about the economy with Stephanie Kelton’

Blog-Reference and Blog-Reference on Mar 29 adapted to context

The Lord spoke out of the bush and handed over these

Twelve Economics Commandments:

1. Never cite the Bible or other religious texts in an economic argument.

2. Maintain the strict separation of science and religion under all circumstances.

3. Maintain the strict separation of science and politics under all circumstances.#1

4. Do not dabble in Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Social Philosophy, or any other of the so-called social sciences.

5. Do not believe: prove.

6. Figure out how the actual economic system works and communicate your results in the format of a materially/formally consistent theory.

7. Absolutely refrain from storytelling, metaphors, analogies, narratives, gossip, insinuation, second-guessing, filibuster, propaganda, disinformation, and other rhetorical means.

8. Do not apply Methodological Individualism/Microfoundations.#2

9. Do not moralize. The subject matter of economics is IS not OUGHT. How the Good Society can be realized has to be determined in the political sphere. See 3.

10. Be, first of all, aware that there are knowledge and opinion, science and non-science, scientific standards/ethics, and anything-goes, true and false with nothing in-between. The ethics of science is objectivity, i.e. material and formal consistency. The objective of economics is the true theory.

11. Rest assured that those who violate scientific standards/ethics go to hell and will be tortured in all eternity with the senseless blather of Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, and Pluralism.#3

12. Make no mistake: alone scientists will go to heaven. As you can easily imagine, the Lord will NOT share eternity with morons, imbeciles, agenda-pushers, blatherers, believers, and fake scientists.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


#1 The strict separation of the scientific realm and the political realm is necessary because politics always and everywhere corrupts science. This point has been made abundantly clear by J. S. Mill: “A scientific observer or reasoner, merely as such, is not an adviser for practice. His part is only to show that certain consequences follow from certain causes, and that to obtain certain ends, certain means are the most effectual. Whether the ends themselves are such as ought to be pursued, and if so, in what cases and to how great a length, it is no part of his business as a cultivator of science to decide, and science alone will never qualify him for the decision.” For details see Throw them out! Orthodox and heterodox economists are unfit for science and The end of political economics
#2 If it isn’t macro-axiomatized, it isn’t economics
#3 Economics is not a science, not a religion, but proto-scientific garbage

Related 'MMT and grassroots movements' and 'The irrelevance of populism for economics' and 'The Supreme Being handed over these Twelve Economics Commandments'

No religion, merely incompetence

Comment on Lars Syll on 'NAIRU — more religion than science'

Blog-Reference

The discussion about NAIRU has always been vacuous because employment is given by the testable formula GraphicAXEC07

For the scientifically valid derivation, see (2014) or (2012).

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


References
Kakarot-Handtke, E. (2012). Keynes’s Employment Function and the Gratuitous
Phillips Curve Disaster. SSRN Working Paper Series, 2130421: 1–19. URL
Kakarot-Handtke, E. (2014). The Three Fatal Mistakes of Yesterday Economics: Profit, I=S, Employment. SSRN Working Paper Series, 2489792: 1–13. URL

Occasional X: Religion, science, fake science, economics (II)

 

#Economics#AllYouNeedToKnow

Since the founding fathers, economists have had to make a profession of faith in Free Trade. ⇓

Reminder: Economics claims to be science but is NOT. The major approaches (Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, and their derivatives)… pic.twitter.com/zHoLjH6Qvb

— AXEC (@EgmontHandtke) March 6, 2025

Related 'Economics is not science, not religion, but proto-scientific garbage' 

NAIRU, wage-led growth, and Samuelson's Dyscalculia

Comment on Lars Syll on 'NAIRU theory — closer to religion than science'

Blog-Reference

The original Phillips Curve was about the relation between the rate of unemployment and the rate of change of the wage rate (Phillips, 1958). Phillips studied more than a century's worth of data and established a stable inverse relation for the United Kingdom. Phillips' original curve was a remarkable empirical finding. It has to be emphasized that Phillips ‘had not made an explicit link between inflation and unemployment’. (Ormerod, 1994, p. 120)

The original curve was transformed by Samuelson/Solow with the simple formula: rate of inflation = rate of wage growth − rate of productivity growth (Samuelson and Nordhaus, 1998, p. 590). This formula, according to Samuelson an ‘important piece of inflation arithmetic’, says that price inflation runs in tandem with wage inflation and that both have basically the same effect on employment, respectively, the rate of unemployment. The difference between the original and the bastard Phillips Curve consisted of a 1 percent productivity growth. This naive calculation led to the far-reaching policy conclusion that there exists an exploitable trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

Needless to say, this basic version experienced refinement, reinterpretation, and qualification in the sequel. It was completely overlooked in the ensuing filibuster, though, that, to begin with, Samuelson's arithmetic was fallacious.

The problem, however, runs much deeper. The Phillips Curve has always been discussed in terms of supply-demand-equilibrium on the labor market as if this were a correct formal representation. Things became worse with the introduction of expectations.

Fundamental to the Phillips Curve discussion is a host of behavioral assumptions. What has been overlooked is that the monetary economy has some objective structural properties. Whatever the agents think, plan, expect, or do, they cannot incapacitate structural laws.

The macroeconomic Employment Law takes the form of the structural-systemic Phillips Curve (2012, eq. (33) and Graphic AXEC36b)

It says:

• An increase in the average wage rate leads to higher employment, i.e. to a lower unemployment rate. This is in accordance with the correlation of Phillips' original study.
• A price increase is conducive to lower employment. This is in discordance with the Samuelson-Solow version of the Phillips Curve, that is, with the trade-off between unemployment and inflation. The stagflation of the 1970s is generally seen as an empirical refutation of the neoclassical synthesis version of the Phillips Curve. This refutation of ‘perverted’ Keynesian economics (Davidson, 2009, pp. 18-20) indirectly corroborates the structural-systemic Phillips Curve, which explicitly predicts stagflation.
• Provided that wage rate, price, and distributed profit all change with the same rate (between zero and infinite percent in the simplified case), there is NO effect on employment at all. This is in accordance with the NAIRU and rational expectations interpretation of the Phillips Curve, i.e., in this case, the Phillips Curve is vertical. The structural Phillips Curve explains verticality without recourse to expectations (rational or otherwise) or any other behavioral assumption.

The structural-systemic Phillips Curve consists of measurable variables and is therefore readily testable against the familiar versions. Behavioral assumptions are always beaten by structural-systemic laws. NAIRU is not close to religion; it is authentic proto-scientific garbage.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


References
Davidson, P. (2009). The Keynes Solution. The Path to Global Economic Prosperity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kakarot-Handtke, E. (2012). Keynes’ Employment Function and the Gratuitous Phillips Curve Disaster. SSRN Working Paper Series, 2130421: 1–19. URL
Ormerod, P. (1994). The Death of Economics. London: Faber and Faber.
Phillips, A. W. (1958). The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957. Economica, 25: 283–299. URL
Samuelson, P. A., and Nordhaus, W. D. (1998). Economics. Boston, Burr Ridge, etc.: Irwin, McGraw-Hill, 16th edition.

Related 'Full employment through the price mechanism' and 'Mass unemployment: The joint failure of orthodox and heterodox economics' and 'NAIRU: an exhaustive dancing-angels-on-a-pinpoint blather' and 'Full employment, the Phillips Curve, and the end of Gaganomics' and 'NAIRU and the scientific incompetence of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy' and 'The flat-earth realism of economists' and 'The father of modern economics and his imbecile kids' and 'How to overcome the manifest silliness of Econ 101 and save the economy' and 'No doubts about wage-led growth' and 'Demand-led and wage-led growth'  and 'Go! ― test the Profit and Employment Law'. See also Lars Syll's blog here and here for wage-led growth. For details of the big picture, see Links on the Phillips Curve and cross-references Employment/Phillips Curve.

For more on wage-led growth, see AXECquery.

***

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Twitter Nov 17, 2022 A question of causality

Twitter Dec 20, 2022 Note that wage increases and price increases do NOT work in the same direction but have OPPOSITE effects on employment/unemployment

Twitter/X Mai 5, 2025 Phillips' original relationship