The dismal science no more! With an election coming up here in the UK, we should bear in mind how many voices are saying that mainstream economic theory is horrendously flawed.
- It doesn’t account for the environment – that’s an “externality”.
- It also doesn’t account for energy – that’s just a commodity, despite the three laws of thermodynamics which every other academic discipline takes seriously.
- There’s the concept in mainstream economics that the economy is like a household where income must equal expenditure – something that even the Bank of England states is wrong*
- The 2018 Nobel economics prize winner tells everyone that “optimal global warming” according to his cost/benefit analysis would be around 3.0°C despite the fact that climate scientists point out there is a very real danger that the Earth System might cross irreversible tipping points which plunge the planet into geo-physical chaos.**
The major political parties in the UK base their economic policies on mainstream economics. It might seem iconoclastic to say it, but a good metaphor would be if the captain of the Titanic had believed that the icebergs were all meringues.
* The Schizophrenic Understanding of Money Creation by Prof Steve Keen: the 2014 statement by BoE
** How an elite clique of economists hijacked climate policy
