Randy Wray — Where Danger Lurks: The Dark Recesses of the Orthodox Mind

Here’s an unintentionally–but riotously–hilarious mea culpa by Olivier Blanchard.…

In the world that Blanchard and other mainstreamers modeled, “economic fluctuations occurred but were regular, and essentially self correcting. The problem is that we came to believe that this was indeed the way the world worked.” …

In other words, like the drunks who look for their keys under the street lights, Blanchard preferred to model impossible worlds because the math was easier. The world—obviously—is not linear, but the math skills of economists were not sufficient to model real, nonlinear worlds.

New Economic Perspectives
Where Danger Lurks: The Dark Recesses of the Orthodox MindL.
Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, University of Missouri at Kansas City

The first principle of general semantics is, "The map is not the territory." The great temptation of rationalism is confusing maps with territory. It's why the scientific method is empirically grounded in testing in addition to being rationalistic with respect to theory. Theory alone is speculation.