So, this is the most revealing comment I’ve read of yours. I think I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of your obfuscations. And that’s what you’re providing here, by the way, not scientific clarifications but sheer propagandistic, ass-covering obfuscations.
Suppose I say to you that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and you say, ‘What on earth do you mean by “straight line”? After all, look closely at any actual so-called straight line and you’ll find plenty of twists and turns. Thus, there’s no such thing as a straight line, so geometers have no general framework for understanding straight lines, nor any consensus on the nature of lines or, by extension, of any other basic shape, such as a square or a triangle.’
That’s the kind of sophistry you’re resorting to. Here, then, is your tell-tale fallacy: you confuse “consensus” with “final, perfect theory,” and you helpfully make this inescapable by saying (with my emphasis), “The idea that economics has to have a consensus on the nature of economies in order to be considered a genuine science is, by far, the biggest load of horse shit you have ever said. It is akin to saying that economics has to be complete in order to be a science.”
I thank you for making that latter comment since it saves me the time of having to fill in the blanks. I’m not asking you for God’s own theory of economics. Obviously, human knowledge is tentative. Obviously, when you inspect the data, you’ll find deviations from models and from ordinary concepts. Obviously, the graduate level of understanding complicates the undergraduate one. Our models and concepts simplify.
But that’s a red herring. I asked you for the basic economic (not biological) understanding of the nature of economies. And to preserve the dignity of scientistic (physics-envying) economists, you had to massacre the real sciences to bring them down to the level of economic pseudoscience.
No, scientists, chemists, biologists and so on may not have the final, absolutely perfect theory of how their respective subject matters operate. Again, that’s a red herring. Each of those disciplines will readily provide a basic, tentative, fallible, but nevertheless working and distinctive picture of what the hell their practitioners are generally talking about when they talk about matter, energy, molecules, life, species, and so on. You can count on that.
So, the fact that you dodged the simple question yet again in this ludicrous manner is very revealing. It’s a QED moment for my sociological thesis on economics.
Thus, I pose the question a third time, reworked to brush off your obfuscations: What, pray tell, do economists generally mean when they talk about economies? Note that I’m not asking for what biologists would say in their reductive manner, nor am I asking for absolute truth. I’m asking for the most basic, distinctive, theoretical content that’s generally held in the field of economics. What the hell is it?
