What this pair of articles on economics implies, I think, is that capitalism is powerful, not so much that it's bad. Clearly, capitalism has advantages and disadvantages. If capitalistic "progress" ends up trashing the ecosystems and dooming us as a species, that kind of economic system which unleashes our myopic selfishness would be perfectly demonic. Then again, capitalism may be just the instrument to power us through and take us off-world.

My point would be that capitalism's status is therefore ambiguous. Things could go either way for us, whereas economists on the whole have been cheerleading for capitalism in one way or another. That's suspicious.

But indeed, I see no reason why there couldn't be objective study of how capitalism works. As I say in the articles, economists might face more temptations than the other social scientists, because economics impinges so directly on big business's territory.

How, though, could we tell which economic textbook is objective and which is slanted by partisan bias? I suppose one sign would be that the scientific text would be balanced rather than one-sided.