The laws of economics, it's often forgotten, are like the laws of engineering. There's only one set of laws and they work everywhere. Armed with a knowledge and understanding of the incompetence on display in military disasters, the more disconcerting is the growing familiarity which comes from knowing and understanding incompetence in neo-liberal American economics through a lens which captures the enduring features and explanations of their performances.

If we assume that people are not indifferent to the profession in which they spend their lives, we cannot dispense with the related proposition that people are drawn to certain careers and professions for reasons that have to do with who they are - the combination of their physical and psychological make-up, in other words. Grant this unexceptional proposition and its corollary, and it can also be safely assumed that people become economists because Economics satisfies what they most want in the form of lifestyle, discipline, status, rewards, and overall expression of personality. Indeed, this is the nature of a profession: its members, by their entry to it and their progress within it, are making the statement: 'This I believe and will live by.' In some cases, the profession of belief is public and explicit - as in the obligations medical doctors swear to discharge in the Hippocratic Oath; in others it is implied but none the less binding if only because the profession, if it takes professional identity seriously, requires and ensures compliance, one way or the other, for the great majority of its members.

In the case of Economics, the first defining characteristic worthy of mention in this regard is its excessive belief in the applicability of the methods of physical science to the understanding of human behavior - what is known as scientism - a sub-culture which hampers rather than facilitates an understanding of the global political economy. That is we see it as an ever-increasing web of rules, restrictions and constraints, presided over by an elite, one of whose motives is to preserve the status quo. Scientism is quite a magnetic quality in Economics. Given that there is a need in any society, particularly the society of states, and most particularly within the dominant states of that society, to be able to describe and explain the production and distribution of wealth, the ability to do so within a discourse redolent of physics fuses many motivations. It is, depending on the moment, a labor of patriotic devotion, as much as worthy public service; at all times, however, it is also a source of upward mobility and personal wealth. Equally, but depending on an economist's position within the relevant hierarchy, it brings forth an opportunity to exert political influence, most frequently over the lives of generations of people who are total strangers and presumably towards whom she or he has no hostile feelings. These in themselves are troubling intimations which only increase when a deeper appreciation of the attractions of scientism is forthcoming.

Stated succinctly, scientism provides a defense against certain anxieties, and, by extension, attracts people with those anxieties and who are disposed to the quality of defense it affords. Within the discipline, they form a community of sufferers as much as a community of scholars who are joined, first, by the expectation, and then the realization of the effective therapeutic gain which scientism extends to its devotees. What needs to be noted, however, is that this does not cure or suppress the condition of anxiety so much as it provides a convivial, secure, and supportive environment in which people with anxieties can not only operate, but operate through approved outlets for their anxieties, and as their anxieties might determine, in socially acceptable ways. (Dixon, Military Incompetence, 1976, p.173.)

In Economics, the causes of anxiety are readily identifiable inasmuch as they are logical extensions of the nature of Economics as a discipline, and as a profession, though the latter is a particular case of a besetting condition with professions themselves. To approach the former is merely to recall that Economics was born on the cusp of an intellectual revolution which ensured the destruction of its seventeenth-century, Newtonian foundations. Choosing to turn its face from this, it has, throughout its history, retained a Cartesian vision of a world which is constant, permanent, simple, static, and invulnerable. In pursuit of this excessively abstract universe it uncritically (mis)appropriated whole areas of a discipline in debacle (mathematics), and the superseded axioms of another (physics), made explicit its refusal to confront the former, and chose data to suit its aspirations, concepts and constructs on an opportunistic basis, in the course of which, progressively and rapidly, their emptiness became as obvious as the discipline's comprehensive inadequacy to the phenomena it sought to understand.

In evolutionary terms, its aspirations were always unrealizable; it never rose above being a pastiche of ad hoc stratagems and became, unsurprisingly, practically irrelevant. In the history of technology and science this is unique, but for the worst of reasons. Preceding the development of scientific thinking around 600 BCE, the Babylonians and the Egyptians at least had the former: certain things - in astronomy, geometry, and medicine, for example - 'worked' but the explanations for their doing so were mythological. It was only under the pre-Socratic Greeks that explanations entirely from the natural world were first ventured. Modernity has not consigned this condition to the past. In the world of the twenty-first century, while it is commonplace for physicists to use quantum mechanics, leading physicists, Nobel Prize winners among them, readily concede that they do not understand it, or how it could be what is. Yet Economics, which defines itself as the science of the production and distribution of wealth, has neither escaped its theoretical confusion despite its strenuous efforts to the contrary, nor approached Antiquity's consolation of providing consistent, reliable, policy-usable outcomes, nor even thought it necessary to adopt physics' humility.

For Economics, reminders of these failures are constant because records are kept and, significantly, they are made available in quality and quantity, and from sources that must be taken seriously. And while it might be the case that avoidance and denial are possible in the early stages of experience, it must also be the case that they eventually penetrate and take up residence in the conscious or self-conscious. Putting the matter bluntly, any evolving awareness of sustained failure – and remember, this is a failure which springs significantly from the organized suppression of the unpredictable elements of human creativity - necessarily induces a chain of anxieties which begin with the fear of disciplinary professional supersession, which then leads into the fear of ongoing failure and social disapproval, and, ultimately, the encompassing fear of disorder resulting from the release of proscribed instinctual forces which the overthrow of the discipline will entail (notwithstanding that they exist and have effect anyway). At stake is a personal professional identity, years of accumulated intellectual capital, and the return on investment that this promises, always provided that nothing changes. The question, then, is this: in the absence of large-scale defections from the discipline, what mechanisms exist within it which allow economists to cope with rising levels of anxiety born of their own incompetence?

Thus economics  today experiences the triple estrangement of modern consciousness: cosmologically, it lived no longer at 'home' (in political economy) but in a rearranged universe; ontologically, it was neither an inhabitant of the natural sciences, nor indigenous to them - it was an appropriator, or colonizer, of them - and politically compelled to settle within them for its future prosperity; and epistemologically, that place was increasingly the perspective which revealed the world to it. Economics and economists could console themselves that they resided in Utopia, but they were only etymologically correct: for all their contrivances that they were creating the perfect location, they were distant, isolated and, in point of fact, occupied no place. Economics lived, therefore, 'beyond the Pale,' and it had, and could take liberties, accordingly. But this was because life beyond the Pale was a reproach to scientific order - essentially lawless, and colonists, though they were subjects, were not there afforded the protection of the regnant authority on the reasonable ground that they paid no taxes to it. Thus it could, and did, run the risk of lonely exile by refusing to acknowledge, or even to be aware in the first place, that life essentially within the Pale - its role model to be precise - is changing profoundly.

By extension, if the world accorded to what was, essentially, Newtonian mechanics, it was also, essentially, static; and being static, it was also, with the exercise of extreme detachment and the expenditure of sufficient scientific effort, subject to prediction and control. Above all, it was, as near as could be imagined in human temporality, an entity in perpetuity, existing for all time - where 'for all time' conveyed an existence coterminous with that of the Earth and its solar system itself. The modern discipline of Economics was thus naturalized, and heralded as but another instance of the unity to be found throughout the universe, in the life of humans as in the ways of the non-human world.  More prosaically and typically, however, the mode of self-disclosed weaknes in Economics has taken two forms:

evasions-through-denials, such denials covering a spectrum from the methodological to the quintessentially human; and dementia in the market. The former is well defined by the extension of Hahn's injunction to avoid the discussion of mathematics in Economics to the more encompassing realm of methodology, or philosophy, in Economics. It is variously seen as either a 'waste of time,' or contrary to common sense; in either case, methodology is discouraged 'explicitly and boldly.' As well, there is a 'clear reluctance' on the part of mainstream economic journals to publish articles in the area, and funding agencies to underwrite relevant research. As Lawson writes of the situation in the UK, 'the training currently provided and recommended for Economics students tends to be more or less devoid of any explicit methodological content.' Given the insubstantial nature of its foundations this might be thought an appropriate response, a method of avoiding an embarrassing acquaintance with doubt, akin to those communities and societies which discouraged their lower echelons from acquiring excessive education for fear that it would encourage challenges to the established order by redistributing knowledge, and hence, power. Indeed, the degree to which mainstream economic analysis excises from its professional deliberations the inescapable context of its being recalls John Ralston Saul's view that its 'greatest desire is to generalize and institutionalize a syndrome resembling Alzheimer's disease.' (Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1997, pp. 4-5).

Moreover, the self-absolving plea that the assumptions of Economics are only assumptions, and relatively innocent ones at that, fails, because these same assumptions disguise the value judgments inherent in the decisions, policies, and ultimately, the views of the world and the material conditions which flow from them. In the denial of this nexus is found another instance of the confusion between the popular addiction to a narrow self-knowledge framed by professional self-consciousness, and a deeper awareness of the self and its relations afforded by an understanding of the origins of historical and social habit - a refusal which, making the modern history of economic theory a tale of the evasions of reality. In fact the institutional forces at work are also evidenced by the under-representation of women among those who receive advanced degrees in Economics, or who are appointed to the faculties of colleges and universities, especially to senior positions. Through a system which is insensitive to many women via the fact that, typically, appointment to a tenure track position (and thus, the tenure review process itself) coincides with the advent of their principal child-bearing years, thus jeopardizing the former if the latter is pursued, albeit temporarily. As the research of Colander and Woos has demonstrated, the option of a fractional appointment for women in this period, when, and where available, is but poor redress since women are then penalized by being paid significantly less than their predominantly male colleagues, and are, on the basis of their decision, often discriminated against in the tenure decision. Within the discipline of Economics in universities and colleges in the United States, as of 1994, women occupied only 5 per cent of full professorships and just 10 per cent of all existing faculty positions - extremely revealing for a discipline with a well-honed (and as we will see, misplaced) mathematical conceit given that women comprise nearly 50 per cent of all mathematics majors. The gendered nature of economic thought which follows from the gendered nature of Cartesian thought provides little support for those who would defend Economics.

It is almost commonplace to record that 'physics envy' seduced political economy away from its roots in society towards the end of the nineteenth century. The success of science, particularly physics, as an exemplar of the ability to control conditions and predict outcomes, promised a rational understanding of the economy through the eye of mathematics (with which physics was braided), which, of course, required a reconfiguration of the study in terms of the methods by which it was to be understood. In the prevailing view, mathematics was to give to Economics, and thus to economists, the relevance and, therefore, the professional status with government, industry, and community, which had progressively been accorded scientists since the age of Newton. Since, in Modernity, mathematics was the highest distillation of truth - exact, unshakeable, and infallible - all that remained for the transformation to be effected was to establish the necessary axioms, isolate the relevant variables, and apply the appropriate mathematics which would reveal economic truth with a clarity without historical precedent.

And Kurt Godel demonstrated that, while mathematics consisted of several schools, each in disagreement with the others, none of the logical principles accepted by the several schools could prove the consistency of mathematics. Even worse for the status of mathematics was an emergent character of confusion in which disagreement between the various constructions attended both the question of what might properly be designated as mathematics, and, within the constructions, of what might be the proper superstructure. (See also Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 307-327.)

Thus the valid charges against Economics made by Tony Lawson - that the discipline is guilty of uncritically, and in a widespread manner, appropriating mathematics for systems or conditions for which they are not suited - is a fourth, and only fourth, order criticism, being degraded, if you will, by the need to understand the long-standing and significant critiques which attend, in descending order, science, mathematics in general, and the prevailing, conventional attitude of economists to mathematics. (Lawson, Economics and Reality, London, 1997, p. xiii.) Thus, fourth, it is significant because it locates the misappropriation within a third order critique which, in simple terms, is the foregrounding of a disciplinary disposition best described as a form of contemptible anti-intellectualism.
 
It is however difficult to be original in describing the character, or the context, of the present. That it is a war that has been underway longer than the two World Wars of the twentieth century is not in doubt. That its casus belli was, and remains neo-liberalism is not in doubt: at every turn, on every available occasion, the belief is repeated among the world's major economic actors that this doctrine is both an imperative and the only acceptable principle on which to organize human - which is to say, social, political, and economic life. Indeed, so dogmatically is it affirmed that the steps to conducting an offensive in its name are virtually litde more than reflexes, loosely automatic responses to the stimuli of power and opportunity. In time, and because of the scope of breadth and depth of the offensive, the physics of the vortex came into play. States, organizations, communities and people were irresistibly drawn into its constant round of frenetic activity, rapid change and destruction. Yet, at no stage did its strategists require it to undergo the one test of political action, namely, whether it made things better, or stopped them getting worse for the great majority of people who would have to bear its consequences.

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