One of the mysteries of economics is its contemporary willingness to ignore everything around it. Economists act as if the economy they study is easily isolated from its surroundings and thus immune to the trends, problems, and changes that go on in those surroundings. Indeed this isolationism is a key component of economics because it allows the profession to preserve and bolster its pretense to being scientific. It allows economists to chat away blithely without concern for the web of entanglement within which actual economies reside. Instead they can pretend to have discovered timeless regularities that allow the ‘system’ to glide smoothly and effortlessly towards a singularity, unsullied by the nastiness of the self-same system’s attachment to other social realities.
It is thus that economists indulge in their fantasies of social physics, and consign anything that interrupts the aforementioned smooth glide to the horrible non-economic netherworld known as ‘exogenous’ forces.
A netherworld which you and I refer to as ‘life’.…The Radford Free Press
Pre-existence
Peter Radford
Peter Radford
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