Thursday, December 24, 2009

What is economics?

Economics is
"intellectual engineering" ... [as] a public relations exercise for the rentier classes criticized by the classical economists: landlords, bankers and monopolists. ...

[D]isdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences. Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by vested interests. There is always self-interest behind methodological madness. That is because success requires heavy subsidies from special interests, who benefit from an erroneous, misleading or deceptive economic logic. Why promote unrealistic abstractions, after all, if not to distract attention from reforms aimed at creating rules that oblige people actually to earn their income rather than simply extracting it from the rest of the economy?

Professor Michael Hudson

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