Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Economics, like science, will progress theoretically and methodologically, or else disappear with humans themselves, “one funeral at a time”

from Ikonoklast, in comments re
Economists like Krugman, Wren-Lewis or Stiglitz are nothing but die-hard defenders of mainstream economics. Lars Syll, Real World Economics Review Blog. July 22, 2019.

Ikonoklast:

The new minds of young people will be open to the new empirical evidence.

The methodological ideology of conventional economics will be destroyed by its failure in the current and ongoing collisions of its recommendations and applications with real systems. This is already happening as Herman Daly illustrates in his paper “Growthism: Its Ecological, Economic and Ethical Limits.”

In turn economics, like science, will progress theoretically and methodologically, or else disappear with humans themselves, “one funeral at a time” as not only current conventional economists die but as millions to hundreds of millions or even billions of other humans die due to ecological and civilizational collapse. The latter catastrophic possibility is what people seldom want to think about. Certainly, we should strive to avoid that outcome if we can. The genuine and imminent fear of ruin and death will certainly motivate people in a new way. Old theories about endless growth economics free from natural limits will be scorned. Those who persist with promulgating such theories will find a metaphorical academic or political “tarring and feathering” could be the mildest of the things that could happen to them.

The current generation of conventional economists will all have to go, by natural senescence and death, into dissolution and their ideas must and will go with them. Currently, science and logic cannot quite yet win the ideological and power war of political economy, at least not against mature devotees of that ideology. These devotees, who are so heavily intellectually and financially invested that they cannot change their minds, will simply have to pass away. Natural processes will achieve that.

However, science and logic do matter for the new minds of young people who are coming up and can be educated in new thinking. With no inherent intellectual investment nor motivated thinking in favor of the current physically and logically refuted ideology ad political economy, they will be open to the new empirical evidence which is constantly arriving even now. Then real change will become possible. People like Lars Syll are torch-bearers of new truths and will be fully vindicated in the long term.

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