imho all the economics we have is a potty attempt to build a grand unified theory on top of false fundamental premises. the false premises are I think well known to all of us: infinity of sources and sinks, the concept of "externalisation of costs," the notion that all goods are quantifiable, the quaint notion that human behaviour is rational, particularly in groups, and the even quainter neoHermetic notion of predictivity from the micro to the macro and vice versa.
if there's a way out it's surely through complexity theory, chaos theory, and social theory (i.e. indices which are tied in some way to concepts such as biotic diversity and robustness, and/or to human security and happiness, such as the Gini index, Solari index, and other attempts currently viewed by orthodox economists as "crackpot") ... and not through same old linear mechanistic fantasies. I sometimes think of economists as denizens of Flatland trying desperately to conceptualise a Buckyball... but I digress as usual.
if we must remain within the terms of reference of wage labour, then we could start with the fundamental question of why employment is audited as a cost instead of a benefit; this was touched on in an earlier thread. if we take the neolib/trad line that employment is a cost to be minimised, then in a theoretically perfect world we end up with a maximally optimised economy in which no one is employed, which reduces labour costs to zero. at which point there is no one to buy goods, so clearly the idea of constantly reducing labour inputs and driving down wages as a process of optimisation or "cost reduction" or "efficiency" is as bogus as the idea that stripmining the ocean floor is an "efficient" way to fish.
I write in haste, about to leave the office, so these are off-the-cuff rantlets and not developed ideas. but tinkering with a system whose fundamental assumptions are flawed is not generally successful in the long run. one ends up having to invent anti-phlogistone and so on. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
