"This article is valuable, not for its insights, but for highlighting the rampant hubris of mainstream "Neoclassical" economics at the apogee of its influence. It opened with the declaration that "Economics is not only a social science, it is a genuine science" (p. 99). ...
"More than 40 pages and over 17,000 words later, it closed with:
"Economics has been successful because, above all, economics is a science. The discipline emphasizes rational behavior, maximization, trade-offs, and substitution, and insists on models that result in equilibrium."
Notice how Lazear engages in a logical fallacy here. He's conflating rational behavior of the discipline with its subject of study. Both are false.
They insist on equilibrium for dynamic systems of dimensions > 3, a profoundly false description of complex systems.
These are the authority figures for public economic policy because business and politicians are taught this flat-earth, geocentric idea of human economy and behavior
"I never expected David's well-documented evidence that barter-based societies were mythical to convince Neoclassical economists to abandon the myth, because without that myth, their entire paradigm unravels. "
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"But David's work did strengthen the resolve of, and improve the analysis done by, the subsets of critical economists to which I belong: the Post-Keynesians, the Evolutionary Economists, the Biophysical Economists, and Modern Monetary Theorists. We frequently find ourselves referring to David's work when we attack the myth of barter, and his work has also had a creative impact upon us."
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