Why lately I write more on sane economics (MMT, MCT) than good urbanism & the social sciences

I have mainly focused in recent months on MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) & MCT (Monetary Circuit Theory, also see here, esp. credit-money & stability), not the other things mentioned in this blog’s tagline.

The reason is fairly simple: It is where I see the most good can come about now.

In this blog I am most interested in addressing what I see as three main problems in the social sciences and their use for the real world:

(1) The highly destructive impact on society brought about by high-modernist architecture/planning on our cities (later aided & abetted by postmodernism; Kunstler is good on this point)

(2) The undermining of the social sciences by postmodernism (Sokal & Bricmont is still a classic on this) diverting attention from real problems. This has served to turn many away from the social sciences, which is particularly destructive in the political realm, when those responsible for funding looked at the results and content of (often postmodern dominated) social science, and understandably rejected it.

(3) Neoclassical “economics”. Economics is the most expensive discipline by far. That is, its undercurrents of thought influence the trillion dollar decisions, actions and policies of governments probably more than any other social science. Whole societies and generations end up essentially as lab rats for the theories of an earlier generation’s “academic scribblers” as Keynes so rightly stated. Incidentally – I see the refuge of neoclassical economics in meaningless equilibrium formulas as the same response as postmodern babble in other social sciences: giving up on understanding in the face of the incredible complexity of the social realm.

 Of these three, I think at the moment it is economics that is most important. Fortunately the tide has changed significantly with the first two. “New urbanism”, which is nothing more than a return to common sense and the normal urbanism of the last 11,000+ years, has pushed the absurd notions of high-modernism (and its subsequent nihilistic, postmodern apologists) more and more out of the picture. It will take generations to undo the damage done by the imbecilic building methods of modernism, but we are on the right path.

More or less the same can be said of postmodernism in academia, although mercifully with a much quicker time-frame for how quickly the puerile, self-serving prattle of the postmodernists and their ilk is being left to gather the dust it deserves: contentless, unreadable, and unread.

THE CASE WITH ECONOMICS is different for several reasons. The Great Financial Crisis (GFC) continues, so the time for change is as urgent as ever, and the political possibility greater. The bad economics of recent decades remains as entrenched as ever, dismayingly illustrated by the policies of most Western governments in response to the GFC.

Additionally, it is not as if the answers aren’t there. This is not an attack on something with nothing constructive to replace it with. There are true descriptions of the economy (e.g., MMT, MCT, Post-Keynesianism in general, The Other Canon), and with them, functional policies that empower the citizenry to optimize its well-being.

So it seems that of the three scourges on intelligent discussion of society mentioned, that somewhat or completely arose from academia – high-modernism in planning and building, postmodernism in the social sciences and humanities, and neoclassical economics – that it is most timely to attack the latter, and strive towards supplanting it with the sane, functional economics of MMT and other heterodox approaches.

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