The Decadence of Economic Theory

Is it ever so boring to be a mere cataloguer of economic facts, a lugubrious clerk in the warehouse of petty history, a dull slave to every percentile variation in the GNP? Then how much more fun to be a revolutionary! Especially if it’s only a parlor revolution, daring in all its lewd intellectual concatenations yet safe as Madam’s card-party; adventurous in its billowy Weltanschauung but so far removed from reality as to be inert gas outside the alabaster walls of the cloister.

We are deep in the caverns of economic theory now. Careful there, the rocks are slippery with moss; be warned of the fathomless logical cavities, the metaphysical cul-de-sacs, and all the methodological stalactites and stalagmites ready to snare the unwary intellect. Be not surprised if you see nothing you recognize. This world is not meant for ordinary mortals; it’s for the merest few—men of occult knowledge and ethereal genius, mathematical logicians with no little contempt for the crude statistics of that vulpine species, the businessman. Economic theory is as estranged from the real world of business enterprise as, say, quantum physics is estranged from the realities of the television repair shop. And yet, while the physicist’s theorizing may find rather immediate, most concrete expression in the repairman’s circuit boards, the economist’s theories have no clear nexus with the natural pulse of economic life. In economic theory, there is no necessary connection between generally accepted facts of experience and their theoretical interpretation. Cash money, for instance, may play an obvious role in actual life, but its position in monetary theory is ambiguous, opaque, contradictory, an issue of hot and cool debate in n dimensions and infinite declensions.

EM

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Edward Meadows

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Is it ever so boring to be a mere cataloguer of economic facts, a lugubrious clerk in the warehouse of petty history, a dull slave to every percentile variation in the GNP? Then how much more fun to be a revolutionary! Especially if it’s only a parlor revolution, daring in all its lewd intellectual concatenations yet safe as Madam’s card-party; adventurous in its billowy Weltanschauung but so far removed from reality as to be inert gas outside the alabaster walls of the cloister.

We are deep in the caverns of economic theory now. Careful there, the rocks are slippery with moss; be warned of the fathomless logical cavities, the metaphysical cul-de-sacs, and all the methodological stalactites and stalagmites ready to snare the unwary intellect. Be not surprised if you see nothing you recognize. This world is not meant for ordinary mortals; it’s for the merest few—men of occult knowledge and ethereal genius, mathematical logicians with no little contempt for the crude statistics of that vulpine species, the businessman. Economic theory is as estranged from the real world of business enterprise as, say, quantum physics is estranged from the realities of the television repair shop. And yet, while the physicist’s theorizing may find rather immediate, most concrete expression in the repairman’s circuit boards, the economist’s theories have no clear nexus with the natural pulse of economic life. In economic theory, there is no necessary connection between generally accepted facts of experience and their theoretical interpretation. Cash money, for instance, may play an obvious role in actual life, but its position in monetary theory is ambiguous, opaque, contradictory, an issue of hot and cool debate in n dimensions and infinite declensions.